


Wayfinding

by rageprufrock



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-30
Updated: 2012-08-30
Packaged: 2017-11-13 04:41:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/499589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which it would be difficult for Deanna Winchester to be the Righteous Man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wayfinding

  
**DEANNA**

_Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies. — Mother Theresa_

  
It's gone seven by the time Deanna pulls up into the driveway of farmhouse.  It's one of those hazy summer nights, where the sun is still coloring the sky dusky reds and oranges, mixing lazily with purpling night, and she takes her shoes off and walks on the cool grass of the lawn the long way around the side of house, shoulders aching, and lets herself in through the back door, bare feet slapping against the sunbleached floorboards of the wrap-around porch.

There's a light on in the kitchen and no one home, just a note — _At Weaver Street for study group — call if you want anything from the store. Sam._ — and a half-pot of coffee still warming on the counter.  She leaves her shoes on the porch and is in the process of pouring herself a cup of coffee and wondering idly if there's anything to eat when her father walks into the kitchen and says, "Dee — "

Maybe he wants to say more, but then she's got a knife at his throat, jerked out of the knife block near the electric coils of the stove, shoving him up against the fridge and listening to an alphabet soup of magnets and receipts and Sam's college schedule scattering onto the tile floor.

"Dee — " he says again, and Deanna lets the blade of the knife scrape over stubble.  He smells like the loamy rot of a cemetery, but underneath, he smells a little like motor oil and highway diner grease and Old Spice, because as a strict-construction chauvinist Dad had always washed up for dinner and —

"Fuck you, drop it," she growls at him.

"I'm not doin' anything, Dee," he says to her, eyes pleading and bewildered and disconcertingly human.  Deanna hates it when they go native, and she hates this thing — whatever it is — for wearing her dad.  "It's me." 

She presses the knife a little deeper into the thing's neck.  "Dad's been dead two years, asshole.  Try again."

"Two years?" he asks, and he sounds lost a beat before he says, "Let me prove it."

Deanna knows better than to let this happen.  Her dad had taught her better than this, tried to strip the doubt and hesitation out of her bones, but mostly he'd meditated on Sam, and anyway, Deanna's never made any secret that she's got a soft spot the shape of her father, as tall and broad as her baby brother.  What can it hurt, she thinks, just a second, and the tension must go out of her arm a beat because the thing's snatched her wrist now, shoving her across the kitchen to slam against the edge of the counter — hard enough to knock the breath out of her.

"You — " Deanna starts, and she doesn't know if she cussing him or herself or what, but the man just winces, her father's familiar regret on its face, and says, "Sorry, baby," and reaches — Deanna braces herself — past her, to the sill of the window, toward the EAST CHAPEL HILL HIGH SCHOOL coffee mug.

He comes back with the silver knife, and instead of cutting her eyes out or peeling her skin off or twisting it in her gut, he cuts a line across his big, dirty palm, blood pooling ordinary and nothing special and normal.

"See?" he asks, gravelly soft, and Deanna feels her lower lip shaking.

"Holy water," she spits at him.  "It's on the sill, too."

He actually _smiles_  at that.  "Good girl," he murmurs, and reaches for it, disguised in an old sun tea pot she'd found at a flea market years ago, and she watches, eyes huge, when he turns the spigot and the water flows over his palm, and all it does is wash away the blood.

She stares a long time, listens to the drip, drip, drip of water and blood on the countertop before she lets herself look at his face again — look at her Dad's face — and he's all big, brassy smile and five-days of stubble and golden retriever eyes, just like every other day she ever looked at him, and Deanna says, "Daddy?"

"Hey," he says, "hey, baby girl," and he lets go of her wrists so she can throw her arms around his neck, grip him close, and after a while, she can't tell who's shaking more, him or her.

***

Dean is fretfully making pie — after pie, after pie — by the time she hears Dad clomp down the stairs again, in clean clothes she'd washed and put away and hadn't given to charity, like she'd told Sam she had, rubbing a hand through his hair and looking normal again, or at least, incrementally less busted.  The sight of him still gives her pause, and she clutches the handle of the pastry knife too hard, but what the fuck is she going to do?  Dice butter into him to death?  And anyway, holy water, silver, you can't fake those out, and if he was going to kill her, he would have done it already, before asking for a shower and begging for something to eat and giving her a lingering, worried look and saying, "You look too skinny, Dee."

"What kind of pie is that?" he asks, reaching for it, and Dee slaps his hand away, automatic. 

"Peach.  Just came out of the oven," she says to him, and feeling her breath hitch, asks, "Dad, what — ?"

"Before you ask," he cuts her off.  "Hell, Dee, I don't know.  I woke up in a pine box in the middle of a dead forest."  He reaches around her, to the half-eaten apple-walnut pie on the cake stand, breaking off a piece of day-old crust.  "All the trees were burnt out.  Something serious went down."

"No shit, Sherlock," Deanna snaps, and hands Dad a fork.  "Jesus Christ."

"Also," he says, giving her a narrow-eyed look.  "How come I _had_  a grave?"

Deanna flushes.  "Oh, no, you're not blaming that one on me.  Your younger daughter cried like a fucking ruined woman, okay?  I tried to get him to agree to a salt and burn."

It's not a lie.  She had.  She just hadn't tried very hard. So much of their lives have been compromise on top of unacceptable loss, and if Sammy had wanted to bury their father right, then fuck everything, he was their father, Deanna had wanted him buried right, too — especially if —

"I'm sorry," she says, sudden, the careful numbness shattering very quickly, like thin ice breaking.  "Dad, I'm so sorry."

He looks confused for a beat before he says, "Dee, no."

"I'm sorry," she says anyway, because she is.  "You died because of me."

" _You_  almost died because of me," he swears, hoarse.

Deanna knows Dad's thinking about that cabin, where Yellow-Eyes had grabbed her by the throat and shoved her into the wall, done something that had twisted her from the inside out until she was dying on the floor, until Sam got off that one shot and a column of black smoke had gone up and out the chimney and just left Dad behind.  She knows he's thinking about the wreck that she doesn't remember, but that Sam said had killed her for sure.  

John Winchester sucks in long breaths for a long time before he says, "I'd do it again — in a heartbeat."

Deanna's eyes are wet and her throat hurts from not crying, and it's easier just to let him wrap her up, fist her hands into the back of his old denim shirt and let him hush the top of her head, saying nonsense, like she was six years-old and scared all over again.

"I'm so proud of you, baby girl," John tells her.

"This family sucks," Deanna answers, because this is seriously fucking shameful behavior, here.

And then there's the sound of a gun cocking and Sam saying, "Get.  The fuck.  Away from her."

***

In typical Winchester family reunion fashion, Sam spends the first ten minutes of his reunion with Dad holding him at gunpoint.  After Dad does his holy water and silver trick again, they spend twenty-five minutes screaming at each other.  Deanna knows this is the manner in which they communicate their overwhelming feelings of affection and concern for one another, and normally she would be tolerant of that, but today she's tired, and her head hurts and her chest hurts, so she screams, "Both of you, shut the fuck up!  For _once!_ " and pulls her peach pie out of the oven before storming upstairs.

Ten minutes after that, when she's let herself have a proper panic in her bedroom and has managed to stop the involuntary tears that keep coming, she goes downstairs to find them looking red-eyed and manly and silent, sitting on opposite sides of the kitchen table talking about how the house is, does the roof need to be retarred?  You been taking care of your sister?  

"Yeah," Sam says, hoarse.

John just shuffles his feet.  "Good," he mutters back.

At two in the morning, when Deanna looks up from where she's sitting on the floor by the mostly closed door of Dad's room, it's because she hear's Sam's familiar footfalls on the creaking upstairs hall.  

"Hey," he whispers, and slides down along the wall, on the other side of the doorframe, looking young and shockingly small in his gray sweatpants, his battered Carolina General Alumni Association t-shirt from freshman year.  

"Hey," she whispers back.

Inside, Dad's passed out, half-horizontal, on the full-sized bed like he always had when he he'd been home, sleeping the ugly, horrible kind of sleep, where your entire body is so tired you sink into the mattress.  Deanna wonders if he's having nightmares, if he's dreaming, if she should wake him, if he's mad at her, if he's not telling her something.  She wonders if she was worth it, really, how he seems to have come out of hell without any scars — new or old.  She's afraid to ask, and all of it must show on her face, because suddenly Sam's not across the way, he's moving to sit next to her, all six foot fucking twenty of him, throwing one huge, heavy arm around her shoulders.

"I'm fine, stop hugging me," she says, pro-forma, because she remembers when she'd been eleven and Sam had been seven it had hurt more to watch her baby brother trying to comfort her than it had to force herself to stop crying.  She's never managed to shake that feeling.

"He's fine," Sam says to her.  "He'll be okay."

Deanna nods, distracted.  "We should call Bobby," she says, because it's been swimming around her head all night and they should.  They should call Bobby.

Sam gives her a squeeze.  He says, "We'll call Bobby in the morning."

"Okay," Deanna says and closes her eyes.  "Okay."

When she wakes up, yellow morning sun is slanting across the upstairs hallway and there's a blanket wrapped up around her, pulled halfway across Sam's lap and draped over her shoulder where they're huddled together in the hall.  Dad's bedroom's empty, and she feels just a split second of panic before she hears noises from downstairs: Dad, the heavy weight of his footfalls, the sound of the fridge opening and closing.

It's so familiar and at the same time so alien that Deanna lets herself sit on the floor a few minutes longer, let's herself shake a few moments, before she peels herself from Sam's side and staggers to weak legs.  She walks barefoot down the hallway, down the stairs, ready for anything, ready to see anything, ready to see nothing.  When she gets downstairs, all she sees is Dad, frowning at their new coffee maker and holding a tin of Maxwell House and looking constipated.

"You're still here," she whispers at him, hoarse.

Dad looks at her, and he puts down the coffee, takes three steps closer toward her.  He looks like she's breaking his heart, like when she'd been hitting puberty like a semi and shit-scared every time they'd hit the road for a hunt.  Deanna's not twelve and crying every time a trucker leers at her anymore — she's a grown-ass woman, but she's afraid to take a deep breath now, because this is her Dad; she's already lost him once, she doesn't know if she can do it anymore, how much more her heart can break.  She clutches fistfuls of the oversized t-shirt she sleeps in to keep herself from throwing herself at him, wrapping her arms tight around his neck just to make sure he's here, that he's real.

"Yeah, baby girl, still here," he promises her.  

"Okay," she says, voice wobbling.  "That's — okay."

And then Dad says, "Hey, Dee, come here," and she goes.

By the time Sam staggers down the stairs — a clatter of terrified, panicked thumps — half an hour later, Deanna's composed herself, washed her face and brushed her teeth and braided her hair in one long, dark-gold plait down her back.  On the counter, the coffee's bubbling and her Daddy's making flapjacks, bacon sizzling on the griddle, the radio humming Zeppelin, how if the sun refused to shine, he'd still be loving her, and if mountains crumbled to the sea, there'd still be you and me.

***

Deanna calls in sick to the hospital and listens to Felicia swear at her for 15 minutes about making their schedule whiskey-tango while Dad and Sam sit in the library researching angrily.  She dials Bobby and twirls the phone cord around one finger, tries not to think about why her Daddy's back, why after two years in a pine box, six feet under, he's come back to them now, as alive and annoying and reassuring as ever.

"What?" Bobby answers, at the end of four long rings.

"Bobby, you gotta work on your people skills," Deanna tells him, but the last syllable trails off into a nervous giggle, and Bobby's known her since she was tearing around in coral-colored shorts and jelly sandals, missing two front teeth, and he asks:

"Deanna?  Everything all right?"

Deanna wants to laugh hysterically and tell Bobby that hell no, everything's not all right.  Her Daddy, who went and traded himself to a demon for her, is back, clawed himself out of his grave, just like that, and that she wants to follow him around, fingers tight on the cuff of his workshirt, like she was four and newly half an orphan all over again.

"Sure," she says.  "Sort of.  Look, Bobby, you should maybe come down to see us."

"I should maybe drive down to God damn Chapel Hill why?" Bobby asks, even though in the background, she can already hear him moving.  She can see the dim, gray-blue light of his hallway, him reaching for his go-bag and holy water and sawed-off and heading for his powder-blue truck already. 

In the library, Sam and Dad are skimming the surface of a fight, Deanna can feel it crackling in the air, and she closes her eyes and goes around the corner, pulls the phone cord tight because she's tired already, waiting for it to hit the fan.  

"I don't wanna say over the phone," she croaks, because hell, it'll just worry him, and no good will come of Bobby Singer driving 120 miles per hour from South Dakota.  He'll get caught, and then he'll blame his moving violation on her, and then Deanna'll have to pretend to be his shrieking harpy daughter again, making herself cry over the phone to a State Trooper about the pregnancy test coming back positive, and she'd sworn she'd never do that again after Sam walked in on her once and flipped the fuck out.

"But you're okay?"  Bobby asks, urgent now.  "Sam's okay?"

Deanna swallows.  "Yeah, Bobby, we're okay.  We could sure use your help, though."

"I'm on my way," he promises.  "Anything specific?"

"Bring books," Deanna tells him, and in the library, she hears Dad calling Sam ungrateful and Sam calling Dad an unbending asshole and knows she better finish up quick, here.  "Lots of books.  Your best research on coming back from the dead."

There's a long pause.  "Deanna Beth Winchester, what have you — "

"Wasn't me, Bobby, not this time," she says, quick.  "Look, just get down here.  And don't break any laws doing it.  If Sam cries at me about unplanned pregnancy ever again, it'll be on your head."

Bobby snorts, "Yeah, whatever," and they hang up the phone.

By the time she makes it back to the library, they're about to go from low-level shitshow to DEFCON4, because for the Winchester's there's almost no in between, and Deanna wonders — just for a second — why her father and her brother can't find any common spaces, why she always has to carve out pieces of herself to play the buffer in between. 

Even driving too fast down I-74 East, Bobby's 20 hours away, Deanna thinks, tired down to her bones.  She stands in the doorway a long minute, listening to Dad shout at Sam and Sam shout back and not knowing what either of them is yelling about except that it's an old fight, and probably she knows it from muscle memory by now, if she wanted to listen, and before she can get up the strength to intervene, the room starts shaking.

"Shit," she says.  Deanna runs to Dad, to Sam, but the high-pitched noise that started the room shaking goes nuclear, and she barely manages throw herself underneath the desk, watching Dad and Sam huddle near a bookshelf when the earthquake goes Richter six, seven.  She feels like her head is exploding, like her brain's going to liquify in her skull it's so loud, and all the books are shaking off the shelves, the walls creaking in protest, and she thinks she sees glass shattering but then —

Then all of a sudden it's quiet, the silence ringing just as loudly as the noise in sudden absence.

She thinks she hears her Dad calling out to them, but it's hard to know for sure, and when she pokes her head out from under the desk, there's broken glass everywhere — big, jagged shards littering the floor, all the windows blown out.

Sam's staggering to his feet, clutching at the bookshelves, and he stares at her and she watches his mouth move but can't hear the words.  He points at her face, at her ears, and she reaches up — the pads of her fingers feel rough on the skin of her cheek, and she didn't think sound could do that, could rock her that way — and when she pulls her hand back, the fingertips are red with blood. 

***

After, they settle in uncomfortably to assess the damage.  

The library windows are total goners, and there're dangerously spiderwebbed cracks all through the downstairs, like a concentrated sonic wave had hit the first floor of the farmhouse.  Sam and Dad and Deanna engage in a lot of semaphore, hand waving and fake sign language and until Dad smacks Sam upside the back of his head for giving Deanna the bird.  It's a comforting reminder that for all the many thousands of ways in which it sucks that Dad wouldn't let her date, fought it every time she wanted to go on a hunt with him and Sam, and thought she needed to be handled, she's got this one up on Sam forever and ever and ever.

When Sam's done scowling at her, she makes him go grab her boots from the hall closet, big, ugly Doc Martens she'd worn during her sexually ambiguous phase — short punk hair, eyebrow rings, a near-miss with getting a tramp stamp — and pulls them on over her bare feet.  This order is communicated by using her limited sign-language skills to spell out DYKE BOOTS.

She tramps through the library in her t-shirt and loose braid, her Doc Martens and her cut-up hands, makes her way through the hallway into the living room, where Sam's stacks of library books have overturned and one massive pane of the bay window has collapsed into thousands of little pieces.

"Shit," she says, and she can feel the vibration, hear it, sort of, in her aching ears.

In the kitchen, the dishes and glasses have mostly survived, but the wineglasses Sam had bought her from his trip to Italy — set out to dry in the rack by the sink — don't make it.  She's starting to get her hearing back, all the noise and voices muffled a bit from reverb, like she's fired a gun too close to her ear, and she hears the sound of furniture moving, books being put back on the shelves, Dad and Sam shouting at each other to be heard.  Deanna collects the pieces of her wine glasses in a box separate from the other shards out of totally idiotic sentimentalism and sets it on the windowsill, next to her collection of Sam's hideous fourth-grade pottery projects: his ugly dinosaur figurine, the awful heart-shaped ashtray, the penholder that looks like the long coil of a tapeworm and painted in a sickening Pepto Bismol pink.

She peeks in on Dad and Sam, finds them pointing at random pages in random books, forgetting about all the broken glass all over the floor in favor of research already, and Deanna figures since they're not punching each other in the face, she'll let this one go, and stomps upstairs to go check her room, to take stock of the damage.

Except her room looks untouched, utterly peaceful, yellow and bright from morning sun, the fading quilt on her bed undisturbed, dust motes floating in the air, all the photos and pictures on the wall just as tilted as they'd been when she'd padded out of her room last night to go sit by Dad's door.  Even the delicate tower of earrings she buys and never wears is unmoved, scattered around her vanity, mingling with her bangle bracelets.

Deanna pulls on a pair of well-loved jeans, the bottom hem frayed from wear, snaps on a bra and tugs on a black t-shirt, leaves her Doc Martens in the closet.  She toes on a pair of battered blue Chucks and goes to the bathroom for bandages, watching her palms bleed sluggishly from shallow glass cuts.

In the mirror, Deanna looks at herself: her green-brown eyes and freckles, her messy blond waves and the pout of her mouth.  She says, "What the hell's going on?" more just to say it than anything, to put it out there.  If she thinks about it too much — about Dad, about whatever the hell just happened to her house, about what this all means — she'll start to panic, and she's never had the luxury of panic before.

None of Dad's best research or wards or anything show any sign of danger or ghosts or bad juju in the house.  There's a brief tussle involving John's opinion they ought to abandon the house, Sam's opinion that John doesn't get to tell them what to do anymore, and Deanna's opinion that the house is the safest and best-warded option they have, and that Sam and Dad can fight on the front lawn and get eaten by wendigos for all she cares if they don't shut the hell up and help her clean.  

Dad looks at Sam, who looks back.

"I'll get the vacuum," Sam sulks.

"I'll go get some work gloves," Dad mutters.

"I'm making myself a fucking drink," Deanna swears.

They've mostly taped up plastic where there should be glass and cleaned up all the shards, calls have been made to the local contractors — who owe Sam and Deanna for a thing with a storage room full of angry poltergeists — and then there's nothing to do but to sit around and worry and research.

In the lexicon of monsters and ghosts, there aren't many that rely on sound.  Sam proposes maybe this is some sort of Mothman, and if they bear any real relationship with bats, perhaps this is sonar gone amok.  Deanna thinks that to blow all their first-floor windows out with that kind of precision, it'd have to be a pretty fucking enormous Mothman.  Whatever Dad thinks, he's not saying, just sitting quiet and brooding, clutching his hands together tight in a double fist on the tabletop, staring at his knuckles, and every time Deanna touches him he jumps a little, like he's keeping himself from grabbing her wrist when she does it.

She wants to ask him what happened, if he remembers hell.  But how the hell do you do that?  Thanks for dying for me?  How was it?  Whenever Dad looks up at her, it's with equal parts grief and consuming gratitude, and he keeps taking her hand and kissing the back of it, keeps stroking his thumbs along the insides of her palms — until she's uncomfortable and worried and scared to ask.

He does it again after Sam calls it quits and goes to bed, and Deanna finds herself sitting at the kitchen table, her father clutching her hand so hard it hurts.  She doesn't pull away, just lets Dad squeeze her fingers like a lifetime, and she touches his cheek and asks, "Daddy, what happened to you?"

John closes his eyes, and she just sits there for a long time, feeling the bones in her fingers creak — Deanna's never been afraid of something as simple and uncomplicated as pain; pain is easy, and she's always been strong enough to take it — until her Dad eases up, until his hands open around hers, until he croaks, "Dee, I know you'd listen, but I don't think I can tell you."

Deanna wonders if this is like when she was fifteen, when she couldn't tell Dad, either, and so she just swallows around the ball of hurt in her throat, runs her free hand over the top of his head, says, "Okay, Daddy.  It's okay."

He falls asleep like that, head swaying lower and lower until he's asleep on top of her hand, bent over the kitchen table.  The clock on the microwave says it's half past one in the morning, and Deanna knows this is going to be killing his back when John wakes up tomorrow.  Deanna thinks about when she was six and her Daddy was lying in bed with a fever of 102, when she was eleven and he had a six-clawed gash down his side, when she was fifteen and Dad lost a fight with a nest of vampires — she can't help, but the least she can do is wait, to keep watch over him.

Deanna feels her ass and her thighs and her feet fall asleep.  She feels her eyes ache from staring, feels her heart constricting in her chest.  This is her Dad.  He died for her and now he's come back for her and the very, very least she can do, Deanna thinks, is bear witness, occupy his silences.  

***

When she wakes up — gray light filtering into the kitchen windows from the beginnings of an overcast summer day — Sam's making coffee and Dad's gone, the house feeling comfortable and cozy and easy, the sound of workboots and strangers in the next room.  It's a coolish morning, and someone's put a blanket around her, the familiar, lingering smell of Missouri's perfume in the yarn of the crocheted throw.

"Hey," Sam says, and sets a coffee mug down in front of her, steaming.

Deanna mumbles something, makes a noise, and touches Sam's wrist in thanks.  "Where's Dad?" she asks, shivering a little.

Sam leans back against a counter and nods toward the living room.  "Giving Dan and Harry shit," he says.

"Why?" Deanna yawns, and blows across the surface of the coffee: black, three sugars.  

Dan and Harry are the brothers Thomasson, who run Snowcamp Specialty Builders, and aside from an unfortunate fondness for chew, are excellent human beings who had kept their shit admirably — even when their passel of fucking poltergeists had started _throwing knives_ instead of just knocking over books.

"Because Dan was stupid enough to express a passing interest in how you were doing," Sam says, smirking, and goes for the cereal.  "You know how Dad gets."

In the next room, she hears Dad say, "So, how much do you guys pull in, average, a year?" and Deanna says, "Yeah, that's enough of that," and gets up, before Dad can start quizzing Dan on the number of sexual partners he's had, if he believe in premarital intercourse (the correct answer being of course, "I'm not certain if I believe in post-marital intercourse, either, in the case of your daughter, Mr. Winchester, sir."), and whether or not he will be respectful of the fact that sometimes Deanna wants to bake a half-dozen pies and watch Dr. Sexy marathons after a particularly shitty hunt.

Deanna manages to intervene before Dan can lose bowel control, and dispatches Sam to mediate between Dad and Harry, who looks like he's about to shit himself, too, but from laughing.  Harry, in the fine tradition of all younger brothers, is kind of an asshole.

"Jesus Christ," Dan mutters, following Deanna through the first-floor to the kitchen, clutching at his chest.  "Your Dad is God damn terrifying."

"Dan," Deanna promises him, "you have no idea."

Harry and Dan have fled — promising to be back tomorrow to begin installing new windowpanes — by noon, Dad standing on the porch glaring as they drive off and Sam in histrionics in the living room.  Deanna considers, briefly, pointing out that even before Dad carked and came back she was a grown-ass woman and that who she invites into her bed is none of Dad's God damn business.

"That boy has a future of mouth cancer written all over him," Dad tells her.

"Okay, Dad, thanks, I'll go take his name off my hope chest now," Deanna allows, discarding the idea, because who knows, maybe dying and going to hell and coming back has made Dad that one order of magnitude more crazy that would result in him pondering the possibility of convents and chastity belts, overprotective bullshit that drives her up the fucking wall.  When Sam had stayed out all night the first time, Dad had bought him a 12-pack of Trojans and told him not to get anything on the Impala upholstery; meanwhile, Josh Carver's probably still standing with his asshole against the wall after the scene Dad had made when he'd caught them kissing after school. 

For lunch, Sam makes piles of grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, and Deanna deputizes her father to open a few cans of tomato soup and heat it up on the stove, which he does while giving her dirty looks the entire time.

"So what, did you guys stop hunting?  After I…"  Dad trails off, probably struggling to fit their circumstances into the confining boundaries of English verb tenses, and Deanna spares him the grief and cuts in:

"We go on weekends, when we can, or evenings if it's local."

"You go with her?" Dad asks Sam, who tenses before he says:

"Yessir."

She looks at her brother, who's looking furiously hard at his grilled cheese, fingers digging into the brown crust on the white bread.  She almost jokes that if he keeps at it the table's going to fly into pieces, but Jesus Christ, that's yet another conversation she and Dad need to have before Sam gets panicked and furniture starts moving around the house, rumbling with all Sam's poorly hidden distress.

Dad stares at his own sandwich.  "That's good," he mumbles.  "Good."

"Dee works at the hospital," Sam jumps in, stammering.  "ER admitting nurse."

"Mostly I yell at people to get their shit together," Deanna says, trying to break the tension, but Dad just looks at her with that wide-eyed and brand new softness she doesn't know if she can handle, a foreign sort of tenderness he'd stopped doling out when she'd turned fourteen what feels like three lifetimes ago.  

But Dad doesn't take the easy out she leaves for him, he just smiles at her, creaky and wobbly and too serious, says, "You were always good at keeping a cool head, Dee, I bet you're great."

Deanna stares at him, feeling like someone's closed a fist around her heart inside her chest.

"She is," Sam says loyally.  "Dee's the best."

"You are," Dad agrees, and Deanna feels dizzy, lightheaded; her face is hot.  And then Dad turns to Sam.  "I know some days, it's the only thing you and I agree on, son."

Sam swallows too hard.  "Yeah, Dad," and Deanna says, "Scuse me," and beats it the hell upstairs, where it's safe and she knows what the hell she's doing and she can sit on the floor of her bedroom, back up against the door, claw at the floorboards, because _what the hell is happening here_.

She must stay upstairs, panicking and failing to catch her breath for too long, because the next thing she knows, Sam's leveraging the fact that he's 6'20" killing fucking wendigos for fun to force his way into her room and wrap her up in his octopus arms.  She thinks she should fix the broken lock on her bedroom door, but she's never brought anybody home here, and when he'd been a baby, Sam used to sneak in during thunderstorms and sleep under her bed.

"I'm fine," she lies, face smashed into Sam's chest.

"Okay," Sam says, because he's always been a soft touch.  "But I'm freaking out, so if you could give me a hug, that would be great."

She does, because she's his big sister, and the first thing she remembers out of her whole life is running out of a burning house with him held close to her heart.  He's her Sammy, and she'd do anything for him, and so she hugs him and shakes and shakes and shakes.

"I'm scared, too, Dee," Sam mutters into her hair.

"I'm not scared, you giant girl," Deanna lies.  "We'll be fine.  Dad's fine."

"And if he's not, even if it isn't," Sam says, with that horsewhispering voice he uses on her when she's on day two of her period and around Nan from the local Baptist church when she's being particularly God-fearing, "you and I are in it together, okay?"

Jesus Christ, Deanna thinks, because she feels like a water balloon, all tension and overfull and if Sam keeps rubbing her arms or pricking her with God damn feelings she's  going to explode and cry like a bitch for _no fucking reason._ That sort of behavior hadn't been acceptable when she'd been fifteen and it isn't acceptable now, so she fists her hands against Sam's chest and shoves him away, sucks it up and tucks it back in, deep in her chest, down where nobody can find it and she can lock it down.

"Right," she agrees, flashing Sam her best crooked smile.  He looks unconvinced, but that's the trouble with little brothers; in addition to being little shits, they are usually conversational in the behavior tells of their older siblings.  "We'll be fine."

"We're stocked up on beer and rock salt and holy water," Sam further says.

"Right," Deanna says, with false confidence and feigned swagger.  

Sam smiles back.  "Right."

And then, from downstairs, there's a thoroughly familiar voice hollering, " _Holy fucking shit!_ " and the sound of a struggle, and Deanna and Sam barely have two seconds to exchange wide-eyed looks before they're loping downstairs, shouting, "Bobby!  Bobby!  Don't shoot!"

***

In addition to a small library, an arsenal that would be envied by some Appalachian anti-government militias, and a bellyful of cussing for Deanna — "Deanna Beth Winchester, _you should have told me on the God damn phone!_ " — Bobby arrives with a psychic named Pamela.  She's got dark curls and bright eyes and she keeps looking at Sam with a speculatively sexual gleam Deanna would find hilarious if it wasn't _revolting_ because it's Sam, and ew, and _it's Sam._

__

"How come you're not asking her how much money she makes?" Deanna asks Dad, helping him pull up chairs to the round table in the library, plastic still flapping in the windows.  In the kitchen, Bobby is making himself a drink and Pamela is touching Sam's ass, and Sam is looking harassed and wronged, in the manner of all maladjusted emo college students who abstain from hook-ups because they think sex should be special.  Deanna has _no_ idea how in the Winchester family, Sam happened.

Dad gives her an aggrieved look.  "Dee."

"I know you don't seem to think so," Deanna tell him seriously.  "But Sam could end up knocked up just as easily, if you don't take care to thoroughly vet his suitors."

"Fuck you, Dee!" Sam yells from the kitchen.

"You watch your mouth, son!" Dad yells back.

"You shut up and set up that God damn table, Winchester!" Bobby bellows, voice bouncing through the hallways.

Deanna laughs, and Dad ignores her in favor of muttering, "Jesus Christ," but he does as he's told, and when Pamela and Sam and Bobby mosey into the room they've got the candles lit, the curtains drawn, the runes chalked in around the table, across the creaking hardwood floors, the rugs pulled away.

"How's this going to work, anyway?" Deanna asks, after they array themselves around the table, awkward in one another's space.

"I'm going to take a look," Pamela says, settling in at the head of the table, a jangle of bracelets, her lipstick bright red.  She's so easy in her skin, something that make Deanna trust her, instinctive.  "Poke around to try and figure out what happened."

"You can do that?" Sam asks, leaning forward, too eager.

"Well," she hedges, exchanging a look with Bobby, and Deanna bets there's some history there.  Bobby's a sour old cuss, but if he washed up and stopped threatening to shoot everybody who moved, he'd be all right.  "I can try, anyway, pull back the veil a bit and see if there's any supernatural trace evidence."

Bobby grunts.  "If anybody can find it, Pamela Barnes can.  Best psychic in the country."

Pamela looks at John with a thoughtfully pursed mouth.  "You don't have anything whatever brought you back touched, do you?  A scrap?  Some sign?  Anything at all?"

And then Dad looks awkward as hell, before he says, "Well, hold on," and rolls up the sleeve of his t-shirt, and Jesus Christ, Deanna doesn't manage to hold in her gasp.  

"Dad," she starts, and he says, "It's fine, Dee.  It doesn't hurt."

It's a dark red handprint, burned into Dad's bicep, high on his shoulder so he's been hiding it all this time underneath shirts and button-ups, and it sure as hell looks like it hurts.  She reaches out, and it's slightly raised under her fingertips, but when she looks up and catches Dad's eye, he's not flinching and not hiding anything, so maybe he's telling the truth when he says again, "It's fine, Dee."

"That'll work," Pamela confirms, efficient, and fits her hand across the mark, thumb and four fingers, and Dee takes Dad's free hand, takes Sam's, too, and they all clutch at each other as Pamela begins to chant, starting in Latin and tripping into English.

The curtains fly open, the radio turns itself on, and in the other room Deanna hears the television start to blare.  Upstairs, Sam's clock radio goes, and in her bedroom there's the shriek of her cassette player, turning on mid-way through Houses of the Holy, everything electric in the house in high dudgeon — and that's before all the candles flare up, shooting a foot into the air.

"Holy shit," Sam breathes, tightens his hand around Deanna's.

"I'm getting a name," Pamela tells them, eyes closed tight and sweat beading on her brow.  "No — don't tell me to turn back, stop looking, you stay here."

"Turn back?" Bobby asks.  "Pamela, maybe you'd — "

"I'm close," she cuts him off, tilting her head down, away, toward where the curtains and the plastic in the windows are flapping, like she's listening for something that's just out of earshot.  "I'm — tell me who you are — tell me — Castiel?" she asks.  "Castiel?"

"Is that a name?" Dad asks.  "That's what it's called?"

But Pamela just ignores the way the table's shaking, the house is shaking, the foundations of everything is shaking and NPR's roaring through the upstairs, clashing with Zeppelin while the candles leave black plumes of smoke pouring through the room.  She just says, "Show yourself, Castiel.  I order and command you to show yourself — I order and command you to — "

And then her eyes burn out.

***

Deanna could find her way to UNC Hospitals ER deaf, dumb, and blind in a blizzard, so she doesn't bother to call an ambulance, just gives Pamela an emergency shot of tranquilizer and has Sam and Bobby and Dad stuff her in the backseat of the Impala.  She doesn't have any time to worry that she's leaving Bobby and Dad home unsupervised, mostly she just listens to Sam hush Pamela's whimpers, drives as fast as she can, clutch at the steering wheel of the car and push the engine harder.

Ron is on call when she gets there, and in 2.5 flat Theresa and Annabell have been called down, too, and then at least Deanna's certain that Pamela's been delivered into good hands.  It's only then that Felicia brings her and Sam cups of coffee, mutters, "Jesus Christ, girl," and leaves them alone to fill out paperwork with trembling hands.

Pamela will be fine, Ron tells her.  She's in shock, but the burning instantly cauterized the wounds, and aside from a secondary case of blindness, Pamela is lucky nothing else happened.  Because having your eyes burnt out is nothing, Deanna thinks, bitter, and she's just grateful that her coworkers are used to her bringing in weird cases, although usually not so literally.

"Go home," Ron tells her, hours later, when it's dark outside and Sam's in the bathroom peeing out the 12 cups of coffee he'd inhaled out of sheer nervousness.  "Barnes' sister is on her way, the police have taken their report, and you look like hell."

"Sure she'll be okay?" Deanna asks, and wonders who the hell is playing Pamela's sister; hunters and psychics, the underground network of their people don't really do functional family.  The Winchesters have always been the exception to the rule — and that's being generous and grading on a curve.

"She'll be fine," Ron promises, and as soon as Sam appears, he hustles both of them out.

The drive home is quiet and scared, and Deanna leaves the radio off, just lets the muffled road noise of the back streets of Chapel Hill fill the car.  

They've lived here since she was seven years old, after Dad had decided they needed to put down some kind of roots, and the farmhouse — ten miles outside of town, in a deep copse of woods and on an easily defensible hill — seemed as good as any place. 

She knows these hills and forests and side streets and the ever changing landscape of a college town like she knows how to breathe in and out.  Deanna left a trail of broken hearts at East Chapel Hill High and swam during deep, muggy summers in the rock quarry, ate breakfast at Weaver Street every Sunday morning with Sam and watched shows at the Cradle, smoked Marlboro Reds on the back porch and let boys kiss her — lazy, Natty Light and bitter nicotine mouths — out in unfenced fields, where the stars were humbling and shaky overhead.  For all the ghosts and monsters she and Sam and her Dad have hunted over the years, they've never followed her home.  She's always been able to stagger back into the farmhouse, turn up the hot water and rinse it all down the drain, slept safe in her bed and woke up to Carolina sunshine, filtering through her deciduous forests in the green flush of late spring.

But now all the windows of her house are blown out and her wine glasses are broken, there're ruined sigils all over the library floor and she doesn't know what she's driving home to, what might have happened while she and Sam were gone.

"What do you think it is?" Sam asks, finally, when Deanna's pulling into the driveway of the house — all the windows bright orange behind the blurry plastic tarp.  "Castiel?"

Deanna fights the shiver that goes down her spine, sets the car in park.

"I'm not sure," she says, and steps out, hears the gravel and dirt grinding underneath her feet.  "But I'm sure as hell finding out."

Conviction is all well and good, but even if the flesh is willing the research may turn up absolutely shit.  They spend hours digging: Sam at his laptop, Bobby and Dad at their books.  Deanna leaves them halfway through the next day, darts out the backdoor in her dark blue scrubs and sneakers and goes to the hospital where she won't feel quite so helpless.  It's Thursday, so there's the usual spate of underage drinkers dumping wildly vomiting friends at the ER doors and driving off, a few nervous parents, a couple of household accidents.  There's a six-car pile-up sometime after 10 p.m. on 40, with most of the severe cases ending up in Deanna's ER, throwing triage into total shitshow in 12 seconds flat, and half-past eleven she has to use a jujitsu move on a violent tweaker.

Sam meets her at the back porch, looking pissy and wronged, arms crossed over his chest like he never grew out of being nine and annoyed by the unfairness of the world.

Just for a second, Deanna feels her corresponding thirteen again: the awful hugeness of everything and the constant inconstancy, the way she'd wanted to fight with Dad and only ever managed to feel the screams in the back of her throat, constricting, and how they'd come out as tears instead, torrents of them like she was a baby, because she didn't even know how to describe everything that was wrong.  And that was _before_ she'd gotten her fucking period, she thinks, and blinks until she's back in 2009, on her back porch with her brother and his constipated glare.

"So Dad and Bobby have a plan," he announces.  

Deanna winces.  "Is this a good plan?"

Sam makes a face.  "They're in the _barn_."

Not only are Dad and Bobby in the barn, they are in the barn covering it in runes, gas lanterns strung up as Bobby chalks them into the moldy black floors, kicks away dirt and straw, and Dad paints sigils along the high, uneven walls.  There're chinks all along the wood, foot and handholds left over from when it was a tobacco barn, and the wood still smells sweet and smokey, tickles in her noise, from long years airing out Brightleaf, although the rickety wooden racks have long since been dismantled for kindling.

Deanna stands in the doorway of the building just to marvel — at the letters and signs and circles that crawl up around the space in languages that nobody speaks any longer.  Bobby and Dad have outdone themselves: Urdu, Etruscan, Greek, hieratic, Egyptian, classical Chinese from tortoise bones, Latin and Gaelic, every language and every summoning spell known to man and preserved by history is here.  It makes Deanna feel very small and frightened, standing in her tired scrubs and bright yellow rainboots in half an inch of standing water and three decades of uncertainty.

"Jesus Christ," Deanna mutters, and Bobby looks up and says:

"I know what you two are thinkin', but there's no way you're staying for this."

"Oh, that's _precious,_ " Deanna assures him, and picks her way around the rotted wood and God-knows-what to where her Dad's filling up shotgun shells with rock salt, standing inside a circle of protective spells, painted into the floor of the barn.  "Seriously, what the hell are you two morons doing?"

Dad's eyes flick up at her, and then back away, and Deanna thinks, what the hell?  Ever since he's been back, and more and more, Dad can't seem to keep her gaze.  

"Dee, Sam, this is dangerous," he tells them, returning his attention to the gun, and Deanna watches his hands shake, barely, and it makes something in her stomach turn.  

Sam scoffs.  "Oh, right, like all the werewolves and vampires and maneating mermaids we've hunted and angry poltergeists — they were a walk in the park."

"This is different," Dad grinds out, and Deanna's too furious to come up with an appropriate response.  Her anger is mixing in with her panic, because she knows that set to Dad's shoulders, that particular slant of his mouth; she spent years decoding him, learning the semaphore of his actions, and she knows he's not going to bend on this, that he's just going to issue this like an order and they better fucking fall in line.  She's almost thirty and she's seen more of the world and it's ugly underbelly than anybody should, but Deanna can't be anything but her Daddy's girl.  She lost him once and got him back and the worry and fearfulness is making her sick.

"Did you see what that thing did to Pamela?" Sam asks, pitchy and terrified, worry leaking through, and at the far edges of the barn, Deanna watches a pitchfork start to move, pendulous, where it hangs on the wall, and closes her hand around Sam's wrist in warning.  "It might be two against one but I still don't like those odds!"

"For once in your fucking life, Sam!" Dad shouts, and he punctuates Sam's name by slamming down his rifle, so hard the metal protests where it strikes the rusted-over side of a card table, an overturned pile of battered wooden crates.  Behind him, the pitchfork freezes.  "For _once_ in your life will you _listen to me_ and follow orders?  Jesus _Christ_."

This is where Deanna itches to hit the eject button, to snag three quarters and find a Coke machine, to buy Sam off with a bag of Doritos and wait until it's quiet, until the air clears and she can to find Dad again and stare at him until he's done being mad at them.  

But they're not kids anymore, and this isn't Sam pitching a fit because he doesn't want to move again, or Dad yelling because it's too bright in the room, and he'd spent the day before celebrating his and Mom's anniversary at a bar before staggering home at three in the morning.  This isn't the three-day fight when Deanna was fifteen, that started with Sam telling Dad he was going to run away and take Deanna with him, because they didn't deserve to be punished because Dad was crazy.  

"Dad," she starts.  "Sam — "

"You are _such_ a son of a bitch, you know that?" Sam yells back, and he takes that one step toward Dad too close, and Deanna grabs the back of his shirt, fisting her hand in the cotton and holds him back.  "We're your family!  We want to help you, and what?  You don't trust us?  You think you can do this on your own?"

And then Dad says, his voice creaking and terrible like a door opening after decades of disuse, "I think that I saw things in hell I don't even know how to describe — and that I _did things_ in hell I don't ever want to think about, and I think — "

Dad looks at her now, his eyes huge and terrified, and Deanna wants to ask him what he knows, what they told him or what they made him see in hell, to remind him demons lie, but that even if they told him the truth that she can take it, that he can tell her.

" — and I would go to to hell again in a heartbeat before I let any of that shit touch either of you," he finishes, voice breaking, and Deanna hears herself say, "Dad," and Sam say, " _Dad_ ," but most of all, she hears Dad keep going, low and furious and sick down into the guts of him, "Now _get the hell out of here._ "

***

They get.

Or, they get outside of the barn, at least, dutifully trotting out the front door, detouring to grab a fuckload of guns from the cellar and then dutifully trotting back out around the back.  There's an old and structurally unsound set of metal riggings that Deanna and Sam learned to climb when they were little, still, and they lead up to the abandoned hayloft, even older than the broken-up wood around the perimeter of the barn, from an even earlier life when the farmhouse presided over livestock and cotton instead of tobacco.  It was dusty but dry and breezy warm, the wind tickling in from the half-opened doors facing outward, to the dark green forests behind the house now.

"Do you think Dad actually doesn't know about this place?" Sam whispers at her, stepping carefully around, although Deanna bets Dad and Bobby can't hear either of them over the sounds of their clanking, their own argument.  It's the same one she's heard a dozen times over: Bobby's sticking his nose where he doesn't belong, John's a sonaofabitch who's unforgiving, unbending.

Deanna shrugs.  "He probably does," she admits, "but I'm not sure he's thinking too straight right now."

Dad's not.  There's nothing about the way he looked at her, the way he's been acting, that implies he came back all right.  He's faking it impressively, but he's still too careful, and every time he touches her or Sam it's hesitating, with a half-beat where he looks like he's going to reconsider.  He won't talk to her, and she doesn't even know how to begin to ask, and Deanna Winchester hates nothing more than feeling useless.  She has good hands, and she hates not being able to use them.

"It _looks_ like no one's been up here in years," Sam says, and picks his way around a stack of old paperback novels, rolled up old sleeping bags in camping sacks, three flashlights, their batteries probably dead.  

Somewhere up here, Deanna thinks, there's still a handful of now-expired condoms, Sam's collection of early pubescent soft-core porn, her diary, a pack of Virginia Slims — stuff they hid here because it was world-ending when they were twelve, when they were kids, when Deanna was seventeen and in love, she thought, for the first time, and she wanted Mark to like her more than she was scared of what the hell she was doing.

She sits, careful, near the edge of the loft, peers down over the half-wall into the barn, where Bobby and Dad have fallen silent now, lighting candles amid the artillery, and she asks Sam, "What do you think it is?  Castiel?"

Sam shrugs, nervy, and he sits next to her, all arms and legs.

"Not many demons burn your eyes out," Sam whispers back.  "Actually, I couldn't find any specific references at all.  If you broaden it out, and just look for ghosts, monsters — _nothing_ does that at all.  It's uncommon."

"Which is bad?" Deanna extrapolates.

"Which is bad," Sam agrees, clutching at his double-barrel like something's about to burst out of nothing right in front of them.  Maybe it will.  It's been that kind of week.  

"Great," Deanna mutters, rubbing a hand across her face.  "Fantastic."

Sam slants her a look.  "You're creepily calm about this," he snipes.

"Oh," Deanna snaps at him, her father's daughter to the core, "I'm sorry, am I behind schedule with the rending of hair, gnashing of teeth, and crying like a bitch?  I lost my Palm Pilot, so, you know."

"I am _just saying_ ," Sam mutters, sullen, and glares down into the barn.

Deanna elects to ignore him and devote herself to wondering how her life came to this.  It's Monday and she's in scrubs and yellow rainboots, with an illegally obtained semiautomatic handgun stuck down the back of her pants, leaning heavily against a 7-pound Winchester Super X3 Field, hiding in the hayloft with her little brother watching their back-from-the-dead father stab a crate with a bowie knife out of what appears to be abject boredom.  Sometimes being a Winchester fucking sucks.

Her coworkers always marvel at her ability to calmly tear people fresh assholes under pressure, but honestly, a couple dozen alcohol poisonings and the human detritus after winning a National Championship or fucking Halloween on Franklin Street are nothing compared to a warren of trolls or that one time she'd spent a week trying to wash the smell of smoke out of her favorite jeans after a run in with fucking _arsonist gremlins._

__

She's never had the luxury of panic, and while Sam spent most of his formative years freaking the fuck out over _everything_ , it was never his job to make sure they had somewhere to sleep that night, dinner — however shitty it was — on the table, homework done, clothing laundered.  It was never Sam's job to say, "Dude, chill out, it's fine," when Dad wasn't, and mean it enough that her kid brother bought it and went to sleep, so that she could stay up all night _silently losing her shit_.  And when Dad had died — Jesus Christ, when _Dad had died_ — two years ago, she'd left Sam sitting in the study to meditate over his regrets and dragged out the Yellow Pages, to call the funeral home and Bobby and Ellen and Pastor Jim.  

Deanna's resented it, sort of, the way people resent things they're born into, but would never give them up; she's the older sibling, it's her job and she wouldn't know how to do anything else, how to act any other way.  The choices she's supposed to make are as obvious and inescapable as gambling debts and lingering regret: they have always demarcated her universe, like the edges of a page in a book of maps.

In the distance, Deanna can hear the rolling grumble of a summer storm, the wind whipping up outside the mostly closed door of the haymow, the summerwick tree limbs snapping against leaves.  Downstairs, Dad's asking, "Hell, Bobby, are you sure you did the ritual right?" and Bobby's growling, "John, if your girl didn't make the best God damn pies in the entire Midwest, I swear."  The air smells wet and electric, and in the crackling of a muffled bark of thunder, Sam asks the question Deanna's been afraid to:

"What if it's bad?" Sam croaks, sounding eleven again, like he'd sounded when he'd picked his way across one of a hundred thousand nondescript motel rooms, past the smoke and over the body and asked her if she was all right.  "What if — what if whatever brought Dad back wasn't...wasn't right?"

Because this is what Sam does while Deanna's doing whatever the hell it is to keep them going: worry over the possibilities, over think, plot.  When they'd been little, Deanna'd teased him and called him Matilda, tugged his too-long bangs and laughed and asked when he'd be able to move chalk with his mind.  It was funnier when it wasn't true.  She closes her eyes and presses her cheek against the rifle, listens to the thunder curling up around the house, tastes the wetness of the May air.

"We'll deal with it," she promises.  "If it's — if it comes down to it.  We'll deal with it."

But Sam just asks, "Will we?  Really?  Because if it came to you, Deanna, I don't know that I could — " and thank _God_ a clap of thunder loud enough to shake the rafters hits right at that moment, derails that train of thought.  

And then it happens again.

"What the _fuck_ ," Deanna says, too loud from their perch, but it doesn't matter.

The thunder she thought she'd been hearing turns into something else entirely, banging like discordant drums, like fists hitting the tin roof of the barn, and instead of the rain she'd been expecting it's just power, a sizzle in the oxygen: fizzing in between the hydrogen and nitrogen and burning underneath her skin.  

Sam says, "Deanna, _look_ ," because outside the blown-open door to the hayloft the sky is spitting out long, blue tongues of lightning, close enough to singe the oaks and sycamores and tired fir trees out back, and the clouds are gathered in dark like they're sitting inside a T-storm, low in its angry belly.

"Bobby, get ready!" Dad calls, his voice far away over the din, and Deanna starts scrambling for the back staircase, and like a reflex Sam gets down on his belly in the loft, trains his scope down to where Dad and Bobby are standing, guns at the ready, so tense neither of them hearing Deanna bang down the ladder.

Overhead, the lights are going, bulbs exploding in a spray of sparks, and Deanna sees as she hits the tamped earth of the floor — skidding, falling, skinning a knee, she can feel it — that the barn doors have kicked open, flung wide, and in the deep and stormy blue of the forest outside, framed in the doorway, someone's walking toward them.

Jesus Christ, Deanna thinks, and pushes herself to her feet, _shoot already_.

And praise be, Dad and Bobby do, and Deanna feels her stomach sink where she's standing, two feet behind her father, watching all the bullets hit in the T-zone and none of it making a dent.  She should be shooting, too, but she just cradles the gun in her hands and stares instead.

He doesn't look evil, the man who's walking toward them, but a lot of bad things look good from the outside, Deanna knows.  He has dark hair — a mess — and blue, blue eyes that are huge on his slim, pale face.  He's wearing an ugly, too-big trench coat, rapidly developing powder burns and bullet holes, getting torn to hell, but he's not even flinching, not even blinking, and his steps are measured and uninterrupted and without the slightest hesitation, implacable.  For a split second — between the cheap blue tie and the wrinkled white shirt and the pretty face — Deanna thinks he looks so achingly ordinary, like someone she might smile at one night before last call at Linda's, who might be drinking overpriced beer at Top-O, before he stops, short, in front of her father and her heart explodes in her chest all over again.

"Who are you?" Dad asks, one hand going behind himself to grip the handle of his knife.

And Deanna feels something shiver its way down her spine, like the trail of unexpected fingers, when the man says — and it comes out like the rolling, faraway suggestion of a thunderstorm — when he says, "I'm the one who gripped you tight, and raised you from perdition."

Deanna thinks, _thank you_ , and then Dad stabs the guy.

"Holy _shit,_ Dad!" Deanna shrieks, and Dad turns to glare at her and says, " _Dee, what the hell_ ," but gets cut off when, like clockwork, there's another bullet that streaks down from overhead and — 

"What the _fuck_ ," Sam yells from the hayloft.

— it just deflects, zings off of the guy's fucking _forehead_ , and before Deanna can get terrified about it or get off her own shot, Bobby's swinging a tire iron that promptly gets caught in the guy's hand and eased down, the man pressing two fingers to Bobby's forehead and sending him crumbling to his knees.

Deanna feels herself gasping for oxygen and whys and hows like a fish for a split-second before the — whatever the hell it is turns to her, catches her gaze, and his eyes are so blue Deanna thinks maybe she's never really known what the hell it meant to say something _was_ blue, before. 

The last bulb goes out, shatters, and the only light left is from the lightning outside, the moon half-hidden behind a cloud overhead, and Deanna asks, her voice is shaking like a leaf when she says it:

" _What_ are you?"

"Castiel," he tells her, solemn like the hush of a church, reaching two fingers toward her, and Deanna feels just the barest hint of warmth, the press of his hand just a moment before he murmurs, "I'm an angel of the Lord," before she's out, legs giving way.

***

__

"And what the hell do you mean, 'work for you?'" Bobby asks.

They're all sitting around the library, feeling wronged and suspicious, clutching at coffee cups and stacks of old books.  

Okay, that's not true: they're all sitting around the library, and Dad is feeling wronged and suspicious; Bobby's recused himself from discussing his feelings beyond giving Sam a stink eye when he asked; Deanna's feeling disoriented, and Sam's feeling — well, from his face, he's feeling awesome, camped at his MacBook abusing the law school's Lexis Nexis account like a motherfucker.  On the other side the room, Dad's going for a gold medal in the international being totally fucking unhelpful and brooding Olympics.  

Instead of trying to strike up some sort of awkward early morning discussion, Deanna's elected to curl up in their battered old wingback, feet tucked up underneath her, trying to shake the memory of blue eyes and electric gratitude out of her head.  She can't.

"I mean," Dad huffs, "he just said, 'We have work for you.'"

"And," Sam cuts in, "he was an _angel_."

"Well, that's what he said," Dad mutters, and when he walks past her, he cups the back of her head, affectionate in a way she knows used to make Sam seethe with jealousy.  She's glad he turned ten, finally, and decided hugs were for girls, anyway, so that she can lean into the warmth of her Dad's palm without any guilt.  "You sure you're okay?"

Deanna smiles up at him.  "Yeah, Daddy," she promises quietly.  "I'm fine."

When she'd woken up in the barn, it'd been morning already, sunlight pouring through the opened doors and the holes in the roof.  Someone had put a musty-smelling blanket over her, and Dad's jacket had been folded up under her cheek.  In daylight, the barn had looked normal again, safe, the same place she used to come to find Sam when he was in one of his moods, the same place she hid when she absolutely had to be alone — nothing at all like the night before night, and even though all the sigils and signs were still decorating the walls, still marking out the floor, it had felt warm and human and ordinary, and everything that had happened before felt like a fever dream.

"You said he had wings," Bobby argues.

Dad looks up at him, frowning.  "I saw something that might have been wings, mostly a shadow," he admits.  "But — "

"Making deals with crossroads demons can't possibly be legally binding in the eyes of the Almighty," Bobby says, wry, leaning back in the desk chair.  "It does make sense."

"This is good news," Sam says, picking up on that thread, and he smiles, giddy with their good luck, and unfolds all seventeen feet of him from the desk chair to say, opening his big arms wide, "Guys, come on.  This is _good news_."

"How the hell is this good news?" Dad demands, and Deanna reaches up to take his hand with one of her own, folding their palms together the way she used to hold his hand when she was just a baby.  

She barely remembers, but she thinks maybe he liked to take her to the playground, somewhere near their old house in Lawrence, and that she'd walked with him — tiny steps, tiny sneakers — and held his hand with him bent over her, following like a huge, dark-haired shadow in her wake.  Deanna knows that most of her memories before she was five are bare instances she's sketched in with her imagination, but she likes to think that it was true, that once upon a time she had the kind of father who followed his daughter to playgrounds and drank fake tea with her in the sandbox, doting.

"Because it's not a demon, Dad," Sam points out, slow, an introductory course in gratitude for the perennially and violently paranoid.  "If it's an angel, then maybe he pulled you out because of God's grace — because you didn't belong there."

Dad clutches at Deanna's fingers hard enough to hurt, just for a beat, and he mutters, "Sorry, baby," before he says to Sam, "God?  Grace?  Sam, I don't buy it."

"You don't have to, but it's looking more and more like an issue of proof versus an issue of faith, Dad," Sam says.  "And look, like Bobby said, _nothing_ else we know could have popped the lock on hell for you — the best proof of what it is is that you're _here_."  

Sam catches Deanna's eyes, and she smiles at him, tipping her head to the side.  She doesn't know if Dad appreciates it the way she always has, but Sam's so good at reminding her there's good, that some people _want_ to be good, and Deanna's grateful for that, even when it's hard to be grateful for anything.

"But why _me?_ " Dad asks, rough, and maybe that's the heart of the question.  

He pulls his hand away from her, looking guilty, and lumbers over to the other side of the room, to where Bobby's situated himself behind the desk and in a fortress of old books, Gideon and NIV and King James versions of the bible and heretical lore.  

"If there is a merciful, involved God out there, why _me_ , out of every — "

"Because you weren't supposed to go in the first place," Deanna hears herself interrupt.

It makes Sam stare at her.  It makes Bobby stare at her.  It makes Dad close his eyes, dip his head low and press his chin to his chest.  It's also true.  

"Because, hell, Dad, you weren't supposed to die in the first place, right?" she says, staying folded up on the chair, pulling her arms and legs in as tightly as possible.  

After that car wreck, when there'd been no way she should have lived, with punctured lungs and a lacerated spleen and a smashed-up kidney and liver and so much internal bleeding everybody agreed it was just a matter of time, just a matter of making her comfortable — she'd woken up fine.  Fixed.  Impossibly perfect from the inside out, the ugly shadow of a purpling bruise on the corner of her mouth.  She remembered being in the hospital bed, looking at Dad's busted-up face, the tears swimming in his eyes when he'd told her a terrible secret about Sam, and how he'd wandered off, promising he'd be back in a minute and they'd talk more, and how that's when the code blue was called.

 "Maybe they're just fixing something that was wrong to begin with," she whispers.

Dad barks, "It wasn't wrong."

"It was if you had to trade your soul for it," Deanna grinds out.

She's wanted to yell at him about this for two years now.  Since he's come back, it had never seemed like the right time.  And while he'd been dead, getting drunk and yelling at his gravestone had, inevitably, led to crying, and twice to Sam coming to find her late at night and half-carrying her home, which, mortifying.

"I'd do it again in — " Dad starts, and Deanna yells:

"That _doesn't make it right_."

"Hey, Bobby, did I ever show you that thing in our kitchen?" " Sam says, supernaturally chipper, and Bobby, that fucking coward, gets right up on his feet and starts following Sam out of the library saying, "No, Sam, you haven't, but I'm friggin' eager to see."

That leaves Dad rubbing his face, muttering, "Jesus Christ," because this is fucked up, whatever this is between them, and Dad knows it and Deanna knows it and probably Dr. Phil knows it, from letters written by concerned passers-by.

"I'm not going to apologize for not wanting my daughter to die, Dee," he says, obviously from between gritted teeth.  

Deanna swallows hard, because what's she supposed to say to that?  No, Dad, I was really looking forward to dying?  She remembers the hospital, and Tessa, with her soft hands and dark hair and easy smile, the way she'd put an arm around Deanna's shoulder and kissed her on the temple, comforting.  Death hadn't seemed so bad, and Deanna was tired, and it had been easy to rest her cheek on Tessa's shoulder, to mull the possibility of sleeping, dreamless, or whatever came after, if it was something quiet and restful and painless.  She can't say that shit to Dad, though, any more than she could tell Sam.

"Do you think I wanted to carry that?" she asks, and she presses her forehead against the rim of the coffee cup because she can't bear to look at Dad.  "To know that I was only alive because you'd…" she swallows hard.  "You shouldn't have done it, Dad."

There's a long, long, horrible silence, and it grows out of the space between them and fills up the air, pushes out all the muted house noises and distant chirping of birds and the the sound of Bobby and Sam hiding in the kitchen.  Deanna looks up when, eventually, she can't stand the agony of waiting for Dad to start screaming anymore.

But Dad doesn't look furious for her ingratitude, he just looks gutted, wild, and she's only seen him like that once or twice in her whole life of knowing him, and she whispers, "Dad?"  He closes his eyes, and when he does, his cheeks are wet.

"I couldn't've, Deanna," he tells her, wrung-out.  "Carried it.  Carried that, if you'd died."

A metric fuckton of things pile up in Deanna's throat, back up down into her chest and fill up all the space in between her thoughts at that.  She's got a whole childhood of dubious responsibility and weird emotional patter.  Dad's always put more on her than is fair, than is right, really, but Deanna's his best girl, she'd been happy to take it.  She knows — and really, really tries not to think about it too much — that she's never just been his daughter, always been some terrible combination of friend and kid and soldier co-parent and spouse, and her college psych professors would have had a fucking field day with the codependency in this family.  She's always lived and died by her father's praise, the tick in his jaw, or that slow, rueful smile she wins sometimes, and how it feels like fireworks on Independence Day and popsicles on the hottest day of summer all combined, how when he's mad at her she's physically sick, and how she's lived with his constant and unspoken disappointments.  Deanna shouldn't put so much on him, but hell, Dad started it.

Deanna's grown up making excuses for Dad the way she learned from Mom, from her earliest days, and just like Mom, she'll never know how to stop, never be able to tell herself to stop cutting John Winchester slack, giving him enough rope to hang them all.  

"I'm just glad you're back," Deanna tells him.  

She carves it out of her chest, even though that's not what she's thinking at all, or at least, not all she's thinking.  Deanna realizes in that instant she's never going to tell him what she's really thinking, that she's just as big a coward as he is, and that they will always live in the spaces created by what they leave unspoken.  There will always be things that Deanna won't be able to bear to tell him, and maybe it's better that way: they've always meant to much to each other, they've always bet the house, and everything in it.

"Okay," Dad says, scrubbing at his face.  "Yeah — okay."

There's a beat and then another before Sam calls out from the kitchen, "Is it safe to go back in there?" and Bobby muttering, softer in the background, "Jeez-us, it's a houseful of idjits in here."

***

Two hours into their marathon research section, Deanna says, "Yeah, okay, ya'll are on your own for this," and goes to work, Sam shouting, "Dee!  Dee!  Oh, _come on_ ," after her and John saying, "Don't yell at your sister."

She spends the day trying not to laugh at people who roll up into the ER with weird shit stuck in weird places and placating little kids who scream like banshees at the prospect of needles.  She never holds it against them; she remembers being shit-scared of hospitals when she was that age, and hell, Sam's never grown out of it, still just idles outside and refuses to come in and wait when he picks her up from work, pussy.  She works a double to make up for the wonky scheduling the past few days, and comes home exhausted, gone through the ringer, to find Sam waiting up in the kitchen.

Deanna checks the clock: 2 a.m.  "It's late, dude, go to bed."

He shrugs.  "Couldn't sleep.  We put out some calls."

"To who?" Deanna asks, and slides into one of the kitchen chairs, stretching her toes, and Sam gets up for the fridge.

"Hunters we know.  System checks.  See if anything hinky's been going around," he says, distracted, and turns back around with a plate.  "I made you a plate.  Chicken parm for dinner — you hungry?"

"Enough to eat the plastic wrap," Deanna says, and Sam laughs and sticks it in the microwave for her, brings it over with a fork and a diet Coke.  "Thanks."

For a while, they talk around the subject of their shared interest, and then they get quiet, the only noise Deanna's fork against the china for a while, until Sam comes up with:

"He's different."

"Who?" Deanna asks.  "Dad?" 

Sam nods.  "Yeah."

He is, a little, Deanna admits.  He's quieter, and where before, John Winchester was always ready with a snotty comment, and usually quick to lecture, he also liked to laugh.  Since he's come back, Dad sleeps badly and spends a lot of time in the cellar cleaning weapons and quizzing Sam on how classes have been, like school and anything she and Sammy did that took them away from hunting hadn't once been one of those wedges that could trigger an entire week's worth of violent silences.

"He died and went to hell, Sam," Deanna says.  "It probably changes a person."

He gives her a dirty look.  "I know that, I'm just saying that — " he makes a constipated face, like he's not sure what he's trying to say, either " — it's weird, having him back.  And not just because he was dead."

Probably, Deanna should say something profound here, but all she can think is, "God damn, we have some seriously fucked up conversations in this family."

The next morning, they get calls back from just a handful of the dozen hunters they'd called, and it seems to be all quiet on the saving people, hunting things front.  

There's generalized suspicion and a good bit of bad blood about why the Winchesters of all people are calling around, given John Winchester's traditional salt-and-burn approach to both hunting and friendships.  And anyway, most hunters work alone, maybe in packs of twos every once in a while for a particularly big job, but they touch base at places like Ellen's Roadhouse and sometimes with research nuts like Bobby and then peacefully vanish into their own corners of the country.  That's not even addressing the issue of Deanna's little brother, quietly ensconced in his third year of law school, who many years ago might have killed another hunter with his mind.  

"Nothing," Bobby pronounces, hanging up the phone.

"Nothing on my end," Sam agrees, and punches END on his BlackBerry.

Deanna listens to Judy Murphy hang up on her.  "Yeah, Judy appears to think nothing, either," she translates.  It's a sentiment that was, technically, conveyed, in between swearing at her and calling her a whore.

Sam smirks at her.  "Judy's still mad about Jackson, then, I gather."

"I don't know why, it wasn't like he was particularly great in bed," Deanna complains, because Jackson had been one of her passing whims during her early twenties, when she felt particularly hideous and everybody else disagreed.  Dad had always taught her and Sam to seize all available assets and sometimes, coincidentally, those assets had allegiances to other people, although clearly not strong enough to keep them from straying into Deanna's motel bedroom.

"Dee, _Jesus Christ!_ " Dad shouts, from the other room, because apparently dying and hell and all that hadn't done shit about his bat ears.

"Ignore him," Deanna tells Sam, who doesn't, and shouts instead, "Don't worry, Dad, Deanna's just kidding — we all know she's saving herself for marriage."

She smacks him upside the head, his bang flying, but Sam's too busy laughing himself sick and Bobby's too busy chortling for anybody to glean any lessons about interpersonal relationships from the moment.

"Right," Deanna tells him.  "For that, you're coming to the Teeter with me."

Keeping food inside the house but not also inside of Sam is a challenge under normal circumstances; adding Bobby and Dad in the equation means that Deanna's given up on making herself a grilled cheese with tomatoes in favor of just dialing for Gumby's most nights, because she knows there's going to be a whole fuckload of nothing in the fridge.  She'd be okay with that, except now they're out of beer, too.

So she and Sam tool around the Harris Teeter in their yuppie green-metal shopping cart and buy Sam Adams  for Bobby and Coors for Dad and Corona for Sam and Red Stripe for Deanna before loading up on frozen pizzas and Morningstar spinach and artichoke bites, which is one of those food decisions Sam makes that leads Deanna to leave him trial boxes of tampons and maxis on his desk.

They're standing in the meat aisle, Deanna pricing steaks, when Sam busts out with:

"I'm really glad it's an angel."

Three girls — obvious freshmen given their GAA sweatshirts and the fact that they're wearing makeup to go to the fucking Harris Teeter at nine o'clock at night — give them a wide berth, and then each other a look, before vanishing down an aisle.

"I mean," Sam goes on, lowering his voice a little, "it's just — maybe our luck changed."

"Sure, angel," Deanna mutters.

Sam gives her a Look. 

She points a package of porterhouse steaks at him.  "I don't want to talk about it," she warns him, because she doesn't.  

"I just thought maybe this whole thing with Dad might have changed your previously held opinions about God," Sam says, because he's a dick, and grabs the steaks out of her hand to swap them out for the organic ones.  "These are grass fed."

Deanna stares down at the price before swapping them for the originals.  

"Those cows  had better be fucking caviar fed for that price," she tells him, and pushes the cart away — porterhouses safely tucked inside — before Sam can start in on her about how he'd just reread the _Omnivore's Dilemma_ and how it had really touched like, him and everybody else in his law school study group. 

They're standing in the checkout line when Sam starts again.

"You really don't believe in God?" he asks.  "Still?"

"Oh my God," Deanna says, more to the store clerk than her brother.  "Credit.  Credit."

"Because I mean, signs and wonders, Dee," Sam pushes on.

The checkout guy's shoulders start shaking, not making eye contact, obvious signs of hysteria that Deanna's trying to ignore for the sake of her dignity.  This is why everybody in Chapel Hill probably thinks they're like paramilitary bible-thumping Clampetts, she thinks bitterly, and hands over her credit card, adding, "We just broke him out of a cult last summer.  They keep telling me the recovery process can take years."

"I believe in God, Dee," Sam clarifies for her, when they're out in the parking lot again, stowing bag after bag of food into the truck of the Imapala.  "Dad's proof of that."

"Sam," she says, slamming the trunk shut, "I do not want to talk about this."

"Because _ultimately_ ," Sam says, instead of listening or cowering in fear at the tone of her voice —

"Jesus Christ," Deanna mutters.  The worst day of Deanna's life had been when Sam had come downstairs for breakfast and realized with an overjoyed shout that after seventeen years of trying, he'd broken 5'8" and, more importantly, could begin towering over his sister.  The additional six thousand inches he grew was just spiteful.  

" — _Ultimately_ ," he repeats, "the point I am trying to make, Dee, is that good things do happen, and…" he falters her, a bit, shy "...you should stop feeling bad about it.  About what Dad did."

Deanna closes her eyes, swallowing hard.  "Yeah?" she asks.  Maybe she should.

"I didn't want Dad to die, either," Sam tells her, earnest and reasoned and hard to argue with.  Deanna doesn't know how Dad does it, because she never really manages to fight with Sam, not when he's trying this hard.  "But I'm so, so glad you lived, Dee."

She feels something that might be tears tickling the back of her throat.  "All right," she declares, more bravado than actual spunk.  "Tuck your vagina back in, I get the point."

"No, I'm pretty sure we should hug," Sam tells her, solemn.

"Stay away from me," Deanna warns him, but she's already laughing, and when Sam dives for her, she shrieks, " _Sam!_ "

"Deanna, I have so many feelings," he insists, and he chases her around the car in the fucking parking lot until she cries uncle and lets him pick her up and twirl her, and she knows he means it, that he loves her, that despite the way Sam judges her and envies her and extends chauvinistic tendencies he doesn't think he has over her — they're family, the closest thing they've had to constancy all their lives.  

If lost, Deanna will navigate by Sam.

"Lemme go, you freak," she tells him, and he does, grinning like a maniac.

"Seriously: _angels_ ," Sam marvels.

She points at the Impala.  "Get in the fucking car."

And then it's Sam and Deanna in the car, just like so many lazy summers during school and frigid, month-long winter breaks when they'd criss-crossed the country and collected postcards and tourist kitsch and scars.  Outside, the air has tipped from the heavy wetness of the day's last burst of heat into the easy chill of early evening, the sky purpling and pink overhead and the red and white tail and headlights of cars looking shaky and impressionistic in the night, banked by dark North Carolina forests.

Sam laughs and rolls down the window, and Deanna cranks up the music, her old tapes reliably awesome now matter how many faces Sammy makes.  And for now, she's driving her baby, and Sam's happy and beside her, the music is blaring and there's long fingers of wind carding through her hair.  Her Daddy's back and alive.  And right now, this very moment, Deanna thinks, is probably perfect happiness, and all she can hear in her head is her own voice echoing, _thank you, really, thank you_ , and she wonders if Castiel is the kind of angel who can hear that kind of thing.

***

Two days later, Bobby goes home.  Deanna sends him off with all the pies she baked, panicking, right after Dad had come back and a squeeze, a kiss on the cheek that makes Bobby go bright red and bashful, out of character.

"Take care of yourself, Bobby," Deanna tells him, watches him put his hat back on.

He nods.  "And you — keep your idiot dad and brother from killing each other," he says.  

Deanna beams at him.  "I've got lots of practice," she says, and watches him drive off, leaving a dust cloud in the wake of the truck as the taillights of it get fainter and fainter in the night, until the sound of the car blends in with the noise of the streets and they're alone again, just the three of them.

"I can't believe you gave him _all_ the pies," Sam says, wronged.  

"It's _Bobby_ ," she says, handing him dishes for the dishwasher.  "He probably lives off of Slim Jims and spite — he needs those pies more than you do."

Sam just fills up the detergent well sadly.  "You even gave him the buttermilk pie."

"And on that note, I'm going to bed," Dad cuts in, pressing a brushy whiskered kiss on her forehead and giving Sam's shoulder a squeeze.  "Night, kids."

Sam's "night, Dad" gets mixed in with Deanna's, "night, Daddy," and because in a really tragic way, they understand this, they don't say anything when Dad detours to the liquor cabinet for the fifth of Jim Beam tucked in alongside the Knob Creek and Jack Daniels.  He's been drinking himself to sleep since he came back, and just like every other night since he'd scared the shit out of her in the kitchen that first night, Deanna finds him face-down in bed, making hurt noises in his sleep.

It's almost 2 a.m., silver light slanting across Dad's bed, and Deanna picks her way carefully across the creaking floorboards, bare feet pressing against the rag rugs.  She doesn't want to wake him up, he needs the sleep, even if it's bad sleep, and when she gets close enough to look, she sees the dark circles under his eyes, the unhappy slant of his mouth.  

She and Dad share a bedroom wall, and for all of the charms of the farmhouse, sound dampening isn't one of them.  Deanna remembers — too vividly, like suffocating — listening to Dad crying at night, the noises of him trying to choke it down, the bangs and knocks when he'd slam into things, accidental.  She remembers Dad knocking out Morse code above her bed, spelling out, G-O-O-D-N-I-G-H-T-B-A-B-Y-G-I-R-L in the aftermath of fights with Sam.  She remembers being eight and waking up screaming from nightmares to her Dad's reassuring face, his big, warm smile, his easy hugs, the way he hushed her, horsewhispered nonsense into her hair and rocked her until she was drowsy again, cried out and exhausted.

If Deanna ever has kids, she never wants them to know the things about her that she knows about her Dad, never wants them to grow up knowing she drinks, that she grieves, that she's scared, that she's fucking it up every step of the way.  But there's also no profit in resentment, so she just brushes the hair off of Dad's forehead and pulls a sheet up over him, picks up the empty whiskey bottle, and goes downstairs.

The kitchen's ghostly, silvered over by the pale light, tinged orange from the street light, with neon green pinpoints on her microwave clock, the stove, the iPod dock-radio Sam had installed under one of the cabinets.  Deanna tiptoes over the freezing tile, jumps onto the rag rug in front of the sink, hums under her breath when she turns on the cold tap — the water lukewarm from sitting in warm pipes — and rinses out the bottle, tucks it along with Sam's mountain of empty Black Cherry Fresca cans and all the beer bottles from the last few days.  

She's looking out the window over the sink, caught in a serious case of the stares, when there's the sound of something fluttering, like a flag flicking in a summer wind, and a voice saying, "I do — hear your prayers."

Deanna freezes.

In the mirror, when her eyes focus, she can see the profile of a man, and there's a shock of recognition that runs through her like an electric charge.

"Castiel," she says, trying the word out on her tongue, turning slowly.

He looks like she remembers — like the little pieces she remembers — dark, messy hair, like he just rolled out of bed, the wrinkles in his shirt and his ugly suit to match.  But just like the last time, she's not really looking at his scuffed up shoes or his tie, and Deanna wonders if that's an angel thing, that draws her gaze to his eyes.

He nods at her, thin lips in a thin line, and even though he's just an ordinary man in ordinary clothes with an ordinary nod, every thing about him echoes volume, is huge, and pre-possessing and fills up spaces in her kitchen she didn't know the kitchen had.  She feels very quiet, still, and there's  thready beat of something a half-step off of fear that's pulsing under her skin, making her neck and her chest and her face hot with awareness: Deanna's been in the presence of ghosts and demons and terrible things — she has never felt this humbling wonder.

"So," she starts, tongue too big for her mouth, "you're — "

Castiel tips his head to the side.  "An angel of the Lord," he supplies.

Deanna laughs, she can't help it, this is all so ridiculous.  "Yeah, okay," she hiccups.

He's silent a long minute, and for a beat, Deanna thinks she's going to get fucking _smote_ or something, but he only shakes his head, like he's done this before, and says, "You don't believe."

"In angels?" Deanna asks, and she can feel the kitchen counter digging into her back, and Castiel just stares back at her, silent.

Deanna's been the object of a lot of considering looks in her years, she's intimately familiar with being taken apart by somebody's eyes, has checked all her buttons and zips to make sure they haven't come open or undone she's been so fucking creeped out — but this is different.  This is something else.

He's looking like her like he's looking through the skin, underneath the muscle and bone, peering in the spaces between her ribs and perusing all the secrets she keeps, paging through the unspoken volumes of her.  She thinks maybe she can feel something like a touch, fluttering under her breastbone, the cup of a warm hand around the curve of her heart, a considering weight beneath her sternum.  She feels pulled inside out, and Deanna knows she should tell him to stop it, whatever it is, or break this moment, but she doesn't, just lets the silence percolate, fill her up until she's dizzy with it.

"I see it's a skepticism you and your father share," Castiel says finally.  

"It's always served me well," Deanna says, automatic, and her breath catches in her throat, like Castiel takes up so much space there's hardly any left for her thoughts.

He rocks back on his heels, an utterly human gesture on such a foreign canvas it looks even stranger.  He looks curious, distantly interested, and he takes a step forward, presses his hands against the counter, near enough that she can feel the warmth of him, smell soap and ozone and something dewey like night.

"You'll thank me for bringing you your father, but you won't believe what I am?" he asks.

She blushes.  "That's different," Deanna argues.  

Castiel slants her a look.  "I don't see how."

"That's different because Dad is actually _here_ ," she says, and the blood in her cheeks suddenly flushes through the rest of her body, something like embarrassment, like anger rushing along her arms and legs, making her jittery, making her feel invincible.  "So, if you're an angel — there's what, a God?"

"You don't believe in God, either?" Castiel asks her, and this time, he turns to look at her.  "In spite of everything you've seen?"

"Not any God with fluffy cherubs," Deanna spits out.

Castiel pushes away from the counter, takes two steps closer.  "There _is_ a God."

She is thinking, unbidden, of the fire in Lawrence, all the good people she's seen die and the bad people who just keep on keeping on.  She's thinking about Malcolm Verkerk, the way he'd bit open her mouth and held her against a motel bed.  She's thinking about Dad, about the shock of physical pain she'd felt when Sam had told her he'd died, that had cleaved her in two like a tree split down to the root.  

"Well, I'm not convinced," she goes on, and she knows she should shut up, knows that the sizzle she can feel in the air is Castiel, that whatever he is, he could probably kills her in between heartbeats, long before she'd ever get a chance to scream.  "Because if there's a God, what the hell is he waiting for?  Genocide?  Monsters roaming the Earth?  The apocalypse?  At what point does he lift a damn finger and help the poor bastards that are stuck down here?"

He doesn't smite her.  Instead, he says, "Free will, Deanna.  That's the trade."

"I thought angels were supposed to protect people," she spits out.

"Read the bible," Castiel shoots back, and when she narrows her eyes, he says, "I'm not here to perch on anyone's shoulder, Deanna.  Angels are warriors of God.  I'm a soldier."

"What's more important than people then?" Deanna demands, because she _has_ read the bible, all the paper Gideon copies left in all the motels she's ever known.  She'd spent a summer cataloguing it for dirty bits, for the stuff about sex and alcohol and prostitution.  "If it's true, and your God made us in his own image — what's bigger, what's more important than _people_?"

It's only because he's so close that she feels it, the sudden tension in his shoulders, when he says, "The Lord works — "

"Do not," she hisses, fierce and trembling, because as long as she's known about father figures with questionable motivations, she's known this fury like a second skin; Deanna might be a good daughter, an obedient soldier, but she doubts, she hurts.  "If you say, 'works in mysterious ways,' I swear I don't know what I'll — "

And somewhere in the space between one second and another, Castiel is so close her breath catches in her throat, chokes her, and when she tries to back away, she finds herself still trapped against the sink, moonlight filtering in around them.  

"This is your problem, Deanna," he tells her, voice gravel and sand and the grit in skinned knees and palms, a sting on her skin, "you have no faith."

But Deanna doesn't really hear him, because in that moment, the darkness of the house behind him, over Castiel's shoulder, is suddenly obscured by something meltingly black, huge, solid like a wall.  She blinks three times before she realizes what it is, and then it's like her heart stops beating, like her blood stops and her breath stops and time stops, and all there is is the hugeness of Castiel's _wings_ — ebony black and sweeping, the glimmering suggestion of jet-colored feathers, eerie and otherworldly and unruly and so close Deanna thinks that if she could move, she might touch them — wrapped around her, wrapped around both of them, hiding them from view, blocking out the rest of the sound in the house, muffling them together.

So that all Deanna can do is stare: at Castiel's wings, at Castiel's blue eyes.

"You say you don't believe, but you sing hosannahs of thanks to me," he tells her, whispers it into the air next to her ear, and Deanna feels the press of his body — heavy, hot through the cotton of his shirt and the rustling of his trenchcoat — along her like a warning, his hands white knuckled on the countertops, blocking her in with his hands and his presence like a weight and his wings like the walls of Jericho, keeping her frozen still.  "You say you don't believe, but it's a dozen of my brothers who died dragging your father out of hell."

It's accidental, it must be, Deanna thinks, frantic, but she feels the soft edge of a feather, she thinks, something brushing over the naked skin of her shoulder, where the nightgown's slipped down, and Castiel says, murmurs it too close to her cheek, near enough she can almost feel the scrape of his cheek:

"You should show me some respect."

"Why did you bring him back?" she asks him, turns her head so she can stare at him from the corners of her eye, gasps the question in little hitches of terrified breath, dignity discarded for panic instead.  "Why would you — "

And that's when Castiel's eyes soften, like he's seen something in her Deanna didn't know existed, something worth protection, worth mercy, and he says, "Your father is a righteous man, Deanna."

"But I prayed before, too," she sobs out.  "When he died, I — "

"And I heard you then, too," he says to her.  It sounds like a promise.  

She closes her eyes, swaying forward, and Deanna wants to lean against him, press her forehead against Castiel's shoulder because she thinks he can take it, that he could take the weight of her, that she could be heavy and he could carry her.

"You aren't going to take him back?" she asks, hoarse, like she's been screaming all night.

"No," Cas says, quiet, all the thunder and fury wrung out of him, and his face, when Deanna dares to look up at him again, is surprisingly kind.  "No, I won't."

Deanna's always been tactile, always ready with a touch, to steady herself against a wall, against the familiar lines of the Impala, always reaching for Sam, for her Dad, and so she grabs a fistful of Castiel's trenchcoat — and it's just khaki, ordinary — and she doesn't die, and the moment isn't lost, and Castiel doesn't pull away.

"So," she croaks, unsteady.  "You're an angel?"

"Yes," Castiel says, and Deanna thinks that if he knew how to smile, he might be smiling right now, teasing.  "And you are still mostly faithless?"

Deanna can't help the smile that tugs at her mouth.  "Yes."

"We can work on that," Castiel tells her, painfully earnest.

Before Deanna can tell him there's _no way in hell_ , he's gone, just the lingering weight of his presence, the void where his wings had been, the sudden shock of sound: the hum of the fridge, cars outside, the whistle of the wind, the creaking noises of the house, settling into its foundation.

And Deanna would swear that it had all been a fever dream, except that in the box of shards on the windowsill, there are four perfect wine glasses instead, gleaming and whole and like brand new, weighty in her hands.

***

She sleeps better than she has in years, maybe ever, tumbling easy into bed and waking up with the sun inching across the foot of the mattress, green leaves vibrant outside her bedroom window.  She feels _good,_ all over, from the tips of her fingers down deep in her belly.  It's alien, and a little too perfect already, and then a fucking bird drops onto the branch outside her window and starts serenading her, and Deanna rolls over onto her belly and settles her chin on her folded arms, watches it until it finishes chirping an extemporaneous symphony, drops into a fussy curtsy, and leaves with a shockingly familiar flutter of wings, a flash of scarab-beetle blue in the leaves.

"Okay, Castiel," she laughs, feeling stupid and blushing, "now you're overdoing it."

When she gets downstairs, Dad and Sam are staring silently at the News & Observer, spread out between the two of them, each gripping coffee cups.  Deanna would normally feel a spike of worry that they're fighting, or that they've just finished fighting, or that they're about to fight, but it's Sunday morning, her Dad's probably not going back to hell, and she could give a fuck about Sam and Dad and their will-they-won't-they-kill-each-other angst this beautiful morning.

"Morning," she says, and wanders around looking for coffee and sugar and the funny pages, distracted as she says, "I talked with Castiel last night."

" _What_ ," Sam and Dad say at once.

She blows across the surface of her coffee.  "He didn't say anything about what work he has for you, though," she adds.  "Sorry."

"When the hell did you talk to him?" Sam asks, the same time Dad yells, "God damn it, Deanna, you have to be _careful_ with this shit!"

She makes them work for the details, not because they're particularly juicy or that she isn't editing — a lot, a lot a lot — about last night, but because she feels good, and she feels happy, and if Castiel was evil, they'd all be dead by now already.  So maybe he is an angel, maybe he's the real deal, and even though Deanna will call bullshit on the idea of a benevolent God forever and ever amen, maybe there are good angels.  She doesn't care what he says about not perching, he'd fixed her wine glasses, he'd pulled Dad out of hell, he'd probably sent a God damn bird this morning like a giant fucking creeper.  She likes him.  Being predisposed to liking people who pull family members out of hell is justified.

"Everybody's seen his wings," Sam complains, "everybody except for me.  That's totally unfair."

"It's a hard fucking life, Sam," Deanna sympathizes, "but someone has to live it."

He pulls his patented bitchface at her.

"Hey, maybe you should hang around rinsing out recycling at three in the morning, who knows," she tells him brightly, "maybe you'll get lucky!"

She puts on a sundress, because it's summer, God damn it, and she loves the way the wind feels on her knees.  She curls up in a hammock with her copy of _Slaughterhouse Five_ for the rest of the day, letting its slow creak rock her to sleep in the dappled shade underneath a tree.  When she wakes up, it's late afternoon, past four, and Dad and Sam are staring intensely at their barbecue, holding bags of charcoal and lighter fluid and crunched up bits of the metro section.  

"You guys need help?" she calls over at them, because man, do they need help.

"I can light a damn barbecue, Deanna," Dad snaps back at her.

"Seriously," Sam follows.  "Go back to sleeping.  Or whatever."

She snorts, and does, which lasts about another half hour until she hears Dad saying, "Hell, you ask her, you quitter," and Sam muttering, "But I'm _starving_ ," and like a good daughter, a good sister, she takes mercy on her idiot family.

"Dad," she tells him, grave, holding the platter and watching Sam nearly drooling off to the side, "you know these steaks?"

Dad gives her a considering look, one eyebrow cocked like he can just tell she's being a sumbitch right now, but he says, "All right, I'll bite," grinning crookedly.  He's holding a two-pronged grilling fork and he looks ridiculous.

"They weren't grass fed," she reports, woeful.  "So you know, Sam can't have one."

Dad barks a laugh, and Sam says, "Oh, _fuck you_ , Deanna!"

"That's a shame, son," Dad says, sympathizing.  "But I understand."

"You two are hilarious," Sam mutters, reaching for the platter, and Deanna holds it away from him, snatching it just out of his reach.

It's warm and breezy and the air smells like smoke and green like grass, and next door, there's the familiar snik-snik-snik of sprinklers going off and Deanna can't remember the last time she felt this happy, the last time everything was so good, the last time everyone she loved was in one place.

"You have your principles, you have to stand by them," she tells him seriously.  "Dad and I can just share yours."

"That's not funny," Sam says, urgent, stomach growling.  "Guys!  That's not funny!"

It's hilarious, and it stays funny after Deanna finally takes pity on Sam and gives him his steak and he eats it sullenly like she's going to try and steal it off his plate.  Dad starts telling a story they've both heard a hundred million times, about the week Sam decided to be a vegetarian in the seventh grade, and how he'd ended up walking to a fucking Hardees on day seven, conviction wavering, and ordering a double whopper at two in the afternoon, ravenous.  After the steak and baked potatoes are gone, Deanna unearths a lemon ice box pie she couldn't make Bobby take with him, and she eats two slices and watches Sam eat the balance, having never actually grown out of that hollow leg phase of his development.  Dad sticks to beer, and smiling at them too fondly, and when the last orange slice of sun vanishes under the lip of the horizon, he slaps Sam on the shoulder and says, "Come on, dish duty, son."  

They leave Deanna on the porch swing, to her fireflies and her Kurt Vonnegut in the yellow and buzzing light on the porch, pushing back and forth with one foot in the curls of summer wind that eddy around her ankles — and a gust that swishes the hem of her dress, the sudden weight of something bigger.

"Deanna," Castiel says, standing next to the swing and studying it.

She swallows back her surprise.  "I'm getting you a _bell_."

He frowns at her.  "Angels do not need bells."

"I disagree, a lot," she says, fierce, and tips her chin at the kitchen.  "Dad's inside."

Castiel glances over one shoulder, to where Dad and Sam are talking, rinsing dishes and sticking them into the dishwasher, and Deanna's sure that in the next five minutes, if she keeps looking through the window, Sam will make his horrified face that Dad's going to put a big-ass bowl on the bottom, where it will keep the water from reaching any of the glasses on top.  It will be a human fucking tragedy, according to Sam Winchester.

"I do not actually need to speak with him," Castiel says, turning back to her.  He's still wearing his trenchcoat, his dark suit, his blue tie, still wearing his otherworldliness like a second skin.  "My orders are to monitor and secure — not necessarily to interact."

Deanna cocks an eyebrow.  People trying to communicate with her father through the filter of her and Sam is nothing new, particularly, but she'd thought better of angels.  "Yeah?  You seem okay talking to me."

"You, unlike your father, don't seem inclined to stab me every time we meet," Castiel tells her, and tilts his head at the swing.  "May I sit?"

The blush, when it hits, is full-body, and Deanna hasn't felt this stupid and young since she was actually pretty stupid and young.  She shuffles over on the porch swing, leaving room, and waves at it, nervous, says, "Go ahead."

He does, and the swing creaks under his weight, tipping forward dangerously for a second until Deanna steadies them with three toes, an expert at this sort of thing.  For a moment, she holds them still, and then the swing moves on its own — or at least she thinks it does, until she slants a look over at Castiel to see his eyes flicking, up and down the boards of the porch in front of them and the swing moves in concert.  Deanna smirks, lifts her toes, lets the swing rock.  

"To be fair, you gave Dad a bad shock," she says, leaning back against the swingseat and watching Castiel, studying him, the line of his nose, the wrinkled collar of his white shirt.  She wonders why he looks like this, if all angels are as effortlessly and unassumingly human-looking, if at the same time, they charge the air around them.  "He doesn't usually just shoot everybody who walks in through the door."

"I was more referring to last night," Castiel tells her, turning to catch her gaze from the corner of his eyes.  

She frowns.  "Last night?"

"I dreamwalked," he explains, like that's as normal as picking up milk at the door or filling up a tank of gas.  "He was resting, and I wanted to speak with him."

"Creepy," Deanna pronounces.  She raises her eyebrows.  "What did he do?"

Castiel looks back at the kitchen windows, where Sam is holding up the detergent and obviously talking about it earnestly.  Dad looks despairing.  

"He said he was going to stab me in the face if I didn't go away," Castiel relays, flat.

"That's my Dad," Deanna laughs.  "What happened?"

"He stabbed me in the face," Castiel tells her, frowning like she's slow.  

"Of course he did," Deanna says, because it's her father — why _wouldn't_ he stab a guy in the face when he was (a) an angel and (b) the one who gripped him tight and raised him from perdition?  

Castiel doesn't seem to mind, really, when she stares at him, and so she keeps doing it, looking at how he's framed in the orange light from the kitchen window and the dots of yellow of floating fireflies in the green-blue dark of night.  Deanna thinks that Castiel is really very beautiful, that he is very much a surprise, that of all the constructions of angels, of heaven, she's ever been told or taught or wondered about, she never would have expected Castiel, of all people, to appear like a lightning storm.  

She thinks, _thank you_ , again, unbidden, because she can't help it.

Castiel's eyes flicker, from the ethereal dark blues of unexplored oceans to something closer to home, and he says, "You don't need to keep thanking me, Deanna."

"Ugh," she says, mortified, cheeks warm.  "You don't need to keep reading my mind."

He's making that face again, like he would smile if he knew how.  "I'm not," he assures her.  "But your gratitude is brilliant and hardly well-concealed."

"Jesus Christ," Deanna mutters, squirming and embarrassed.  She feels in awe of him, too curious, like when she'd been seven and Miss Forrester had worn polka-dot black dresses and kitten heels and bright red lipstick, been the most beautiful, interesting woman in the world.  "You gotta work on those creeper tendencies."

Castiel looks curious.  "Creeper," he repeats.

"You stare a lot," she explains.  She would tell him how it's not like when other people stare, that leering is mostly revolting and calculation is worse, but that there is something about the way Castiel looks at people that makes her wish she'd washed up, first, makes her want to check under her nails, go to confession.  "Plus, the bird."

"But you enjoyed the bird," Castiel argues.  "And his song."

"What's this work for Dad, anyway?" Deanna asks, changing the subject, because she refuses to have an angel sitting on her back porch swing next to her only to argue with him about if he's being a creeper or not.  Even though the answer is yes.

At this, Cas turns back to the kitchen window, shoulders tense.  

"Your father's work remains a mystery to me as well," he confides, his voice a scrape stone over gravel.  "I sought revelation last night after we spoke.  There was none to be had."

She worries.  "Then — "

"Humans are not tools, Deanna," Castiel interrupts, and he keeps staring at her father, looking intent.  "Our Father created you to make your own choices.  Your father will not be remanded to hell simply because he does not serve a cosmic purpose."

"But he does, doesn't he?" she asks, nervous anyway.  He looks at her, like he's disappointed his reasoning isn't enough; she wants to believe him, but she's still mostly faithless, and life has mostly proven that's the right way to approach it.  "I mean — you told him you guys had work for him, and now, you're still hanging around.  There has to be a reason, right?"

Castiel gives her a look that Deanna is starting to read as "vexed."

"I had been told he did."  He pauses and looks down at his hands, folded together, and looks surprised that they are.  "But those orders have been rescinded — I'm now ordered to watch, and ensure his and his family's safety."

"I hate to break it to you, Cas," Deanna says, "that's sort of what a guardian angel does."

"Cas," he repeats, trying it out in his mouth.

"Castiel?" Deanna corrects, hating the way her voice tilts up in a question at the end.  

Once, when she'd been waiting in line at the pharmacy, she'd read some bullshit article about how women tend to phrase things as questions, not because they were actually uncertain, but because it was how they were indoctrinated to put forth ideas.  Deanna had thought it was total horseshit at the time, but of course, she was also in line at the God damn 24-hour Woolworth's at the asscrack of dawn for a Plan B pill so obviously her judgement was questionable at best.

Castiel only says, "No one's ever called me that before."

"I mean, I could stop," Deanna offers, except Castiel — _Cas_ looks oddly disheartened by her offer, and before she can drill down into the layers upon layers of weird inherent in that, the back door opens.

"You want any coffee?" Dad asks, leaning out.

Deanna freezes, waiting for the boom.  Only after ten seconds, after twenty seconds, after thirty seconds of Dad staring at her like he's starting to suspect Girl Troubles — he'd always said it with capital letters evident, like the province of her bustline and menstrual cycle was a nation state of shit he just didn't even want to know about — before Deanna slants a look to her side to find Castiel gone, just empty space on the swing next to her.

"Fucker," Deanna says, mostly to herself.

" _Excuse me?_ " Dad asks, because even though he has the moral high ground of a coal miner to talk to her about language and behavior, he's also got enough of an old school chauvinist in him to wish Deanna wouldn't act like such a boy.

"I would love coffee," Deanna tells him, and pushes off the porch swing, looping an arm into her Dad's as she follows him, barefoot, back into the kitchen, where Sam is doling out big mugs of joe in the warm orange light of the house.  

Later that night, after Dad's drunk himself to sleep again, Sam goes to stand in her doorway and frowns at her until she asks, "Jesus, Sam, what?"

"You're not telling me everything," Sam informs her.  "About talking to Castiel."

"I'll have you know I gave a full and robust report," Deanna protests, because she did, and because there's no reason Dad or Sam needed to know about the way Castiel's body had felt, trapping her against the kitchen counter, or how, exactly, he'd revealed his wings, how she'd wanted to touch them.  Similarly, Deanna did not need to give her father any more excuses to stab his angel in the face.

Sam shakes his head.  "No.  You're keeping something from me."

"I've been meaning to tell you, Sam, but the world doesn't actually revolve around you," Deanna confides, because she might be joking right now, but sometimes, she actually fucking means that, and Sam actually fucking doesn't get it.  

His frown transmutes into a glare.  "Deanna."

"Samuel," she replies.

" _Deanna_ ," Sam repeats.

" _Samuel_ ," she sighs at him.  "It was nothing, okay?  I was putting something away in the kitchen, Cas had just come back from getting stabbed in the face in Dad's dream — "

"You didn't tell me this the first time," Sam cuts in, immediately, eyes gleaming, and Deanna knows she's fucking caught for sure now.  Sam's pretty dumb, and worryingly gullible, but he's going to be a poisonously good lawyer one day.

Deanna shrugs and looks away, pulling her hair up into a ponytail and padding over toward her dresser.  She can see Sam in the mirror, looking at her like she's a puzzle to be solved, and it would be disconcerting except that Sam's been doing that as long as she can remember.  The irony is that what he sees is all she is; Deanna's never been anything more or less than just herself: 5'8", dark blonde, green eyes, likes pie, easy.  She doesn't know what Sam's always been looking for, what he thinks he sees, but he's been staring, ever since he was just a baby and she was one, too.

She looks down at all the earrings she never wears, pairs them up with a finger, listens to them jangle.  She says, "Okay, so fine, I left some salient details out.  Big deal."

"How many other salient details did you leave out?" Sam demands, stomping into her room and crossing his massive arms over his massive chest, glowering down at her.

Deanna frowns at him.  "Seriously, Sam, are you juicing?"

"Because Dad stabbing Castiel in the face doesn't seem like nothing to me," Sam just says, totally ignoring her question.  He wrinkles his fivehead.  "Have — have you been talking to him?  I mean, have you talked with him?  Since the kitchen?"

She shrugs.  "Just a minute, tonight, on the back porch."

"I didn't see him," Sam says, suspicious as hell.  "Neither did Dad."

"As Cas prefers _not_ to be stabbed in the face, he decided to carry out his monitoring duties from a comfortable distance," she says, and the corner of her mouth tugs up, involuntary, at the memory of Castiel's face as he'd said it to her.

"Monitoring duties," Sam parrots.

"Apparently, whatever work heaven initially had for Dad has been canceled," Deanna tells him, and when Sam goes ashen and before he can ask, she puts a comforting hand on his arm and promises, "Cas says that nobody's taking him back.  We get to keep him."

Sam stays frozen, looking punched in the gut for a beat before he finally manages a jerky nod, and Deanna just stands there, quiet and waiting for him to catch his breath again.

"I don't know what's happening either, Sam," she admits, "but I don't think Cas is the bad guy here — I think he's okay."

Instead of looking comforted or distrustful, Sam's face melts into glee.

"Oh my _God_ ," he cries.  "You have a _crush on him_."

"Yeah, okay," Deanna decides, grabs him by one ear, and tosses him out of her room, Sam laughing, "Deanna and _Cas_ sitting in a tree — K-I-S-S-I-N-G," the entire time.

***

The next two weeks are quiet.  Too quiet, really, just Deanna and Sam and Dad, getting used to being in each other's spaces again.  It's the longest uninterrupted stretch of time they've ever spent together with Dad getting a phone call and vanishing off onto a hunt, and the peace lasts maybe another four days before Dad and Sam are back at it again.  

They fight over everything; they fight over nothing; sometimes, Deanna just sits and marvels, because one day she came home from work to find them screaming at each other about transmissions.  Standing at the foot of the stairs, debating whether or not she cares enough to intervene, she realizes Dad's being an asshole in making an earnest fucking point about the superior driving experience of the stick and Sam's interpreting it as some sort of put-down of his decision to go to law school.  She takes a bath instead, taking the iPod speakers Sam bought her for Christmas and cranking Back in Black to eleven, because she loves her brother and her father, but they can go fuck themselves.

They do a couple of local jobs: a poltergeist in Greensboro, a tiny troll in the basement at Allen & Son, for which they're paid like kings in barbecue, rousting a ghost from the eighth floor of Davis Library.  She doesn't let Dad out of her sight, and she knows that he's starting to chafe at it, but he's been dead two years and back half a month, pardon the fuck out of her if she's a little paranoid.

"He can take care of himself, Dee," Sam tries.

"Yeah, he's so good at it he _died_ ," Deanna snaps.

"You can't keep keeping him locked down, dude," he insists.  "You know how Dad gets — he's probably going to start building pipe bombs in the basement and writing a manifesto or something."

Deanna knows that's probably true, but still, the next three jobs that come calling are interstate, and she conveniently loses the number.  The people who know John Winchester's back can be counted on one hand anyway — not even the Harvelles know, yet — and they all just accept it when Deanna says she and Sam can't get away.

"This is exactly the sort of shit Dad used to do when boys called looking for you," Sam warns.  "You do not want to start acting like Dad, Dee."

She knows he's right, but she figures she'll see how much longer Dad manages to bite his tongue before he blows up at her.  Every day she gets away with it is another one she doesn't have to worry he's getting jumped by a nest of vampires, choked to death by a ghoul, drowning after getting caught by a mermaid.  

Anyway, there are more immediate problems than Dad's future occupation, because worse than Dad and Sam fighting is Dad and Sam getting along.

The only things they really share are (1) genetics, (2) uneven and violently protective instincts toward her, which is a fucking joke since she has better God damn aim than either of them on her worst day, (3) a love of obsessing over shit.

"Bobby says he might have found a lead in an old Sumerian myth," Sam says.

Dad just nods solemnly, like that means something, and makes a mark in his journal and says, "I also found something that might be useful in an old Coptic version of the Gospel of Mary."

It's day four of their decision to ferret out the truth of Dad's return.  They've burned through the Judaic tradition, Islamic religious writings, most of the more conventional pagan doctrines, and taken a brief and fruitless detour into Hindu that had been hemorrhaged by the fact that not many reliable translations of occult documents existed.  They're almost done driving Deanna insane talking about Zoroastrian tradition and Hoodoo and she thinks that if they circle back to Judeo-Christian myth trying to find clues to a mystery Deanna couldn't give two shits about solving, she's going to beat them both to death with a kitchen stool.

She doesn't know why they're so fucking desperate to decode it, to figure it out, to reason something that maybe just happened without any reason.  Sam's always accused Deanna of having an incurious mind, but being incurious has its benefits and boons, and where Sam's always pushing, always prying, stepping on landmines left and right, Deanna's happy — or if not happy, she's content with — where she is, what she is, the way her life has shaken out in the end.  She doesn't need to know why Dad's back, what his greater purpose is; if Dad's back, if the angels are going to just let it be, then why the fuck can't Sam and Dad?

"I am so fucking excited that you're going to New York in a week," she tells Sam feelingly that night. "I seriously cannot handle two of you going on like this much longer."

She means it, because that means one Winchester male will be out of her fucking hair and probably too busy killing himself doing his summer at Sullivan & Cromwell to encourage Dad's more self-destructive tendencies.  

Instead of expressing regret for being a fucker, Sam looks at her with crazy eyes and says, "Hey, why don't you ask Castiel about it?"

"Aside from the fact that I haven't even seen that guy in like a week," Deanna says through gritted teeth, "what makes you think he's going to be any more chatty now than the other two times I asked him what the hell was going on?"

"Well," Sam says, perfectly stone faced, "absence does make the heart grow fonder."

"I fucking _hate you_ ," Deanna swears, and stomps upstairs, cheeks flaming. 

For reasons Deanna doesn't want to examine in any depth, she ends up in the kitchen again that night, past two in the morning, staring at the silver dollar of the moon and the comforting, familiar shadows of tables and chairs.  There's no thunder on the horizon and no lighting fringing the clouds hovering over the treeline, and she thinks, feeling horribly stupid, _Cas?  Castiel?_   When she doesn't get an answer — which, _obviously_ she doesn't get an answer — she feels her whole body get hot with embarrassment, and she tiptoes back up the house stairs, kicking herself so soundly she almost misses the shadow of a man standing over Dad's bed.

***

Deanna remembers when she was twelve and bored out of her God damn mind in that motel room in nowheresville, Dad on some bullshit hunt that was going nowhere fast.  She was too young to go with him, Sam was too bitchy and eight to enjoy as a sibling, and it was the sticky, miserable sort of hot that filtered in around the faint whiff of cold air churning out of the AC.  She'd read all her books, twice, ran out of crosswords to do, and nothing was on the TV.  She'd collected a handful of quarters and gone looking for a video game and came back to a fucking shtriga trying to kill her brother, sucking all the light out of him, and even thought Deanna's hands hadn't been shaking when she'd picked up the gun, until Dad busted into the room and saved the day, that knee-jerk hit of full-body cold has never left her.

And two years after that, in the lazy August heat, a few weeks before high school started, they'd been in Mississippi, and Deanna remembers meeting Malcolm, another hunter, for the first time: the way he smoked Marlboro Reds, his button-fly jeans, his shitkicker boots and crooked grin, and the way Dad had given him a sharp look and hustled Deanna into the motel room.  If he could have locked the door and thrown away the key, he would have, and maybe it would have done her good.  

The way it worked out, Dad got tangled up in a particularly complicated piece of exorcism work in a restaurant in Biloxi, and Deanna applied herself with equal fervor to leveraging her brand new body as well as she could.  The flare of her hip and the weight of her breasts had been brand new and as alien to her as anything, but Malcolm had liked them, liked her, and he'd snuck her into bars and bought her rum and cokes and nipped at her collar bones, made her feel grown up the way she thought she was at fourteen, palmed her tits over the stickshift of his Chevy truck and stroked a finger over the seam of her pussy — teasing — when he'd kissed her with his smokey mouth.  She remembers waiting until Sam was neck deep in the library and sneaking back to the motel, letting him into the room she and Sammy were sharing at the Grand Fairway Motor Lodge.  She remembers panicking when his hand had crept up the inside of her leg, underneath her denim skirt, and how she'd said, "Malcolm, stop," and "Cut it out," and "No," and "Please," and being ignored.

More than that, really, Deanna remembers — her whole body numb even though the had been pounding in her ears so hard she can't even hear over the sound of her own panic — looking up to see Sam standing in the doorway, eyes round and terrified and the room in chaos, Malcolm dead on the floor, his own knife in his gut.  She remembers asking, "Sammy, how — ?" and how he'd just run into the room, grabbed her by the wrist and started dragging her to the car, because they had to get away.  

She remembers huddling by the soda machine in the parking lot, clutching Sam's flannel shirt around herself, asking, "Sam, did you…" and Sam staring at her with red, wild eyes like his heart was breaking and he didn't know what to do when he'd said, "He was hurting you — I couldn't — I didn't mean to — I didn't know I could — " and how she'd hushed him and hugged him.  She remembers ignoring the way her lip was bleeding and probably other places were bleeding, too, because they had to get the hell out of that motel.  There was a dead body in the room, and they had to get away, and Dad would be back soon and he could never know what had happened and Jesus _fucking Christ_.

And in the hierarchy of fears Deanna has experienced in her too-long-already life, she doesn't know where exactly it falls to find the bald man in the Brooks Brother suit standing over her father, but it's high, she thinks, and so she grabs the nearest thing — a picture of her and Dad and Sam from some long forgotten summer — and hurls it at him, watches the glass shatter in midair.

***

"That," the man says, clucking at her, "is rude, Miss Winchester."

She looks for something else, anything else; Dad has a gun under his pillow, but she'd never make it in time.  She has a knife in her room, a rifle near her collection of impractical shoes, but that's yards and yards away, and more to the point, _why is Dad still fucking asleep?_   

"Oh, don't worry," the man assures her.  "There's nothing wrong with your father, I just didn't want to interrupt his well-deserved rest."

"Sure you didn't," she spits at him, edges closer to Dad's bed.

The man lowers his hand, flicks his wrist, and Deanna's eyes widen as she watches the broken glass of the photo frame begin to knit back together, the scar across the picture healing itself, efficient.  And it's then that Deanna realizes the muffled silence of the moment: no ticking clocks, no wind rifling through the leaves outside Dad's opened windows, no creaking of the house settling.  It's like the kitchen with Cas all over again, except where Cas had been sprawling and glitter-dark and like a breath she couldn't catch, Deanna feels wrapped in cotton, dying from deoxygenation: painless and spare.

"And you, Deanna Winchester, are exactly as Castiel said you'd be," the man laughs.

She tenses.  "How do you — "

The man holds up a hand, interrupting, and Deanna watches the photo frame drift gently through the air, back to its place on Dad's dresser, sets it down with a tiny click.

"Before you get too worried, sweetheart," he says, like he's gearing up to sell her snake oil and miracle cures, "Castiel and I, we're colleagues."

Deanna narrows her eyes and takes a step back.  " _You're_ an angel."

"Not all of us could find male model pretty boy vessels, you know," the man chortles, and before Deanna can ask, "vessel?" he's pushing on.  "Now — we've gotten off onto the wrong foot, but — " he holds out a hand, and when he smiles, he looks like the mid-level hospital administrators Deanna hates the most " — I'm Zachariah, at your service."

She ignores his hand.  "You're an _angel?_ " she repeats.

"Oh, ye of little faith," Zachariah sighs and withdraws his arm, but perking up, he says, "Then again, I was warned about that, too."

Deanna makes a mental note to kick Cas in the nuts the next time she sees him.  

"If you're an angel, where are your wings?" she demands, and she tries not to think about how idiotic it sounds, how after an entire life of batshit, impossible things, sometimes twice before breakfast, it came to this.  

Zachariah arches one eyebrow at her, and slowly, like he's reevaluating the situation, he says, "Now, you're very pretty, but I'm not that kind of girl, Miss Winchester."

Deanna swallows hard.  She doesn't really have a response to that.  "Fuck you" seems somewhat inadequate given the circumstances.

"Show me," she demands.  "You call me faithless — I need proof."

He laughs, and she can tell it's at her.  "Okay, okay, you win," Zachariah says, and eyeing her with interest, says, "But don't go telling all the other boys in school.  I wouldn't want to get a reputation."

Deanna's about to inform him that it's great he thinks he's funny, because he's not actually funny, when suddenly the space in the room is cut in two, and where Castiel's wings were the swallowing dark of dreamless sleep, Zachariah's are rainbow — brilliant, gorgeous — like someone upended a rainbow across the long, flawless feathers, not a single pinion out of place, gleaming and still in the night.  They arc across the darkness of the room and vanish, seamless, into the walls, and Deanna wonders how broadly they stretch, if they extent past the edges of the house, into the forest beyond.  


"Convinced?" he asks, smirking.

Deanna nods, just a jerk of her chin.  "Okay," she says, hoarse.

The wings wink out.  "Nice angels usually don't go around flashing those," Zachariah explains.  "Although this certainly puts Castiel's recent behavior into a brand new light."

Deanna's scowl must manifest faster than she thought, because Zachariah holds up his hands, dismissive, friendly.

"But!  That's none of my business, is it?" he says, cheerful.  "Anyway, I know I'm not much to look at wearing this vessel of mine, but believe me you, missy, in heaven, I have _six_ wings and four faces, one of which is a _lion_."

"That's — " Deanna starts, and then gives up " — no, that sounds horrible."

"Hey, your little boyfriend looks like a tree," Zachariah says, stung, and Deanna barely has time to think, _I like trees_ , before he tells her, "But all of that is beside the point."  He looks down at Dad.  "I've come here on orders."

The inside of Deanna's mouth goes dry, and the silence gets huger and huger around them until everything goes still, too: not a single movement, just Deanna and Zachariah and Dad asleep on the bed dividing them.  

"What orders?" she asks, her throat hurting with worry.  

Zachariah's face is kind.  "Deanna, you had to have suspected," he says, gentle.

And it pours in, all the paranoia and fear, because no matter how many wendigos Deanna can keep dad from chasing or how many violent ghouls, it comes down to the fact that she can't really protect him from the forces that be.  There are angels and demons and monsters, and they're all circling Dad like they want something from him.  It had been too easy, after two years of numb hurt and guilt like an open and unhealed wound, to have Dad back and absolution, to have peace, and to have on top of all of that Castiel tell her it was okay, that maybe good things just happen.  

She should have known then, and should know better now, but she just shakes her head.  "No.  Castiel said that Dad — "

"Castiel is a soldier, Deanna," Zachariah interrupts her.  "He's given orders and does what he's told.  Most of this stuff is above his security clearance."

Deanna doesn't think about it, but she closes that last space between herself and the bed, fists her hand in the sheet, near Dad's foot.

"Please don't take him," she says, hoarse.  

She thinks about where she might hide Dad, what she could do to buy them some time, even a few minutes, maybe that would be enough to get Dad out of the room, into the car.  And then at least they'd be on the road and harder to nail down.  Maybe she can ask Cas for help, but he's an angel, too, and even though apparently she's been thinking his name as hard as she can for five minutes now, it's into the muffled, overfull space of the room, nowhere beyond, and Deanna can't really explain it, but she knows somewhere in the bone that he can't hear her right now, that she's got no signal.

"He was never supposed to come back.  The fact he got out at all was an error, a misfire," Zachariah murmurs, eyes sad.  "He made a deal with a demon, Deanna.  There's a reason we discourage those — this is out of my hands."

"He made the deal for me," she insists.  

Zachariah gives her a lingering, honeyed look, eyes gleaming, and he murmurs, "Oh, and I don't blame him for making it.  You are quite a _remarkable_ specimen, Deanna."

__

"There's gotta be something I can do," Deanna snarls at him, ignoring the way she can feel all of those words like oily fingers over her body.  It's that odd comprehensiveness, again, the way that Cas had looked at her the first time, like he was seeing through her and about her and around her, a 360 degree snapshot of her everything.  Castiel had just looked; Zachariah feels like he'd dipping a thumb in the space between her breasts.

"Oh, Deanna — you won't remember any of this," Zachariah tells her, flicking from leering to soothing in a heartbeat, so fast she knows he's faking it, all of it.  "I know this all feels horrible now, but as soon as I'm done with your father, I'll zap you and Sam.  It'll be like this never happened."

Maybe that's true, maybe angels can do that, but Deanna doesn't believe.  Cas has said her problem is a lack of faith, and she readily admits it.  She doesn't believe that she can lose her father again, not like this, knowing he's trapped in the pit because of her, because he hadn't been able to let go of her, knowing that she would be carrying it, the guilt of it, the loss of it, all over again, like a stone on her chest.  She doesn't believe that there's no other way, that they have to do this, that she's built to live this life of constantly yearning and never getting, that there isn't a moment of peace she can curl up in and make home.  She doesn't believe she can do this to Sam, again, that they can afford to lose the only family they have left anymore.  She doesn't believe that Zachariah will let her forget.  Mostly, she doesn't think she'll let herself forget.

And she's known this has been living in the back of her throat all along, that from the minute she saw the man in Dad's room or maybe even before, she's been ready, waiting, but even so, when she says, "Take me instead," it comes like a surprise.

***

The next morning, it's pouring, and Deanna makes a bunch of phone calls sitting cross-legged in her bed, clutching the phone between her shoulder and her ear, tying up some loose ends.  All in all, it takes about 20 minutes — inclusive of the ten that Felicia spends swearing at her, noises of the ER busy in the background — and then Deanna's done, and she's got nothing to do but stare out the window of her bedroom at the thunderstorm battering all the waxy green leaves outside and breathe.

This time, she hears the flutter of wings and grins.  "Hey."

"You vanished last night," Castiel informs her.

"I was home, all night, promise," she tells him, turning to look at where he's sitting on the corner of her bed now, trench bunched up around his hips, eyes blue and disquiet.  His hands are folded together, hanging in the V of his legs, elbows resting on his thighs, and it's such an ordinary gesture it looks alien against his otherness.  She wonders if he knows, that he's distracting and handsome, and that she likes looking at him, that she could look at him all day, but she imagines if he can hear her hosannahs of gratitude, he must know this, too — he hasn't call her out, maybe he doesn't mind.

"I meant your soul," Cas tells her.  "For two hours last night, I could not locate you."

_Creeper_ , Deanna thinks, but without any heat, and that's how she should have known she was fucked from the get-go.  

"What are you doing locating my soul, anyway?" she asks, trying to sound normal about it.  "I thought you were Dad's non-guardian guardian angel."

Cas pauses.  Like he's collecting his thoughts.  "Your father _is_ my charge."

Then Cas pins her with one of those looks within a look, like he's trying to write entire novels about feelings that angels probably aren't supposed to have, and he says, his voice rough over her skin:

"But your soul is as bright and ageless as a fire in heaven, entirely unique to you.  I could recognize you anywhere, through anything, I could find you in an instant in a crowd of six billion.  I would not even have to search."

"Um," she says, breathless, all the blood in her body gathering in her cheeks, across the tops of her breasts.  She's never blushed this hard before in her life.

"Your soul," Cas starts again, hesitating.  Then, like he doesn't mean to do it, he reaches one hand out, strokes a finger down the line of her shoulder like he's never touched skin before, but has wanted to, as long as he's known how to want.  "It barely fits — is barely contained beneath your skin."

Deanna leans into the touch, because it's been ages since anybody touched her like this: casual, without any intent, because he could.  She loves to be touched, arches into it, even when it's just a precursor to sex and never the point, she still loves it, the sparks it sends up along her spine.  Maybe no one has ever touched her like this, because the warmth and weight of Cas's fingers are innocent, in its own way, thoughtful and unhurried.  She thinks angels must look at people like art, something pretty to be studied at a distance; maybe Cas was that kid who wanted to touch the Picassos.

"John Winchester is my charge," Cas tells her, "but my eye is always drawn by you."

She should laugh, play it off, change the subject the way she always does, but instead she asks, breathless, "Really?"

Then Cas smiles for real, and it is small and private and just for her, and Deanna commits it to memory, like Sam's wide-open laugh or the brushy affection of Dad's kiss on her temple, folds it away deep inside herself.  Castiel's fingers slide up her arm, into the hollow between her collarbones, barely touching, but Deanna can feel him all over, the weight of him, and she wonders if his wings are extended, if they are wound around them both on this rainy Thursday morning, hiding them away.

"You are your father's daughter, and you are beautiful," Castiel tells her, murmuring it like a verse of Psalms, "but you are also our Father's daughter, and you are radiant beyond all words — "

At which point Deanna has to kiss him, just to interrupt the flow of words from his mouth, because it's too much, it's _mortifying_.  She doesn't even like being singled out at birthday parties and now Cas is talking about her like she's — like he — and she doesn't want to think about the implications, especially not now, so she just kisses him and kisses him, wet and worshipful and closed-mouthed, puts a hand on rough chin and does it all over again.  

"Thank you," she tells him, in between kisses, and Cas cups his hands around her face, his thumbs and palm and fingers wanting and uncertain what to do about it.  Deanna's miles from Earth right now, giddy with bliss and preemptive grief and terror and she wonders if Cas can taste it in her mouth.  "Thank you, for everything."

Cas pulls away from her, watches her with those wide, too-blue eyes.  He asks, "What did you do, Deanna?  Where were you?"

"Nothing," she lies, and it tastes like ashes in her mouth.  

She wants to say, _I had to_ , and _I'm sorry I'm going to miss everything, I'll miss you_ , and ask, _what is it like? In hell?_ But she doesn't, just lets herself lean into Cas, smells the printer paper and ballpoint pen ink smell of him, so beguilingly ordinary for someone who makes the air in her room crackle with electricity, and it figures, she thinks ruefully, that of all the people in the would, she would trip, tumble, slide into yearning for this one — for someone she can't have and shouldn't anyway.  

"Sorry," she murmurs, forehead pressed into the cool khaki of the trench.  

Cas stirs, puts a palm between her shoulder blades.  "For what?" he asks.

"For kissing you," she lies.  She's not sorry about that at all.  She'll carry it with her when she goes, when Zachariah comes for her.  "I know angels probably aren't supposed to."

She feels him smile into her hair.  "Don't be," he counsels, and strokes her back, unfamiliar with the gesture, though he seems to know it by rote, large palm sliding along her spine in comfort.

"Stay here," Deanna says suddenly, pulling away to look up at Cas.

He frowns.  "I have other — "

"Just today," she tells him.  "It's raining, it's dark, it's scary — come on, Winchesters need their very own guardian angel today.  And Sam has never seen your wings."  


Castiel's mouth knits together in irritation, and he squares his shoulders.  Deanna wonders if — if she could see them — his feathers would be ruffled, annoyed.

"I am not in the business of showing everyone my wings, Deanna," Cas  says.

"You showed them to me," she argues.

He levels her with a look, a faint echo of his earlier gaze, but it still feels like a fist gripped around her heart, squeezing the breath out of her.

"You," Cas says evenly, "are special."

"Well, Sam is short bus special," Deanna says, determined, curling her hands into the gathered fabric of his trench like a child, and she watches Cas's eyes flick down to her fingers, where they are probably warm through the coat.  It's worked before.  Maybe it will work again.  "Stay.  We'll play board games.  I'll teach you how to make a pie."

He looks torn.  "Deanna — "

"You can write this off as anthropology," she proposes, feeling a strange, vertigo-inducing desperation.  "Studying your human charges in their natural habitat."

His eyes are softer now, when he looks at her.  "You will not tell me where you were?"

"I wasn't anywhere," she lies again, ignores the way her heart flutters under her breastbone, like it wants to give away her secret.  She knows this is something she has to do, and more than that, do on her own; Deanna doesn't know why she's started to doubt this: that her choices are a weight she can't divide.  "I just want you to stay today."

Cas slides his palm down, into the well of her spine, warm and huge across the back of her waist, and he promises her, "I will stay," and Deanna gives him her most brilliant smile.

***

The house is still and quiet and cool from the rain when she and Cas tiptoe downstairs.  She'd made him leave his shoes and tie, his trenchcoat and suit jacket upstairs, tossed across the foot of her bed, and she laces their fingers together and leads him down the hall, down the steps, and she tries not to think about how small her hands feel inside of his, and how she shouldn't like it as much as she does.

The kitchen looks gloomy and atmospheric, water patterns diamonding on the walls, and the tiles are deliciously cool against Deanna's bare feet.  She's still in her pajamas — gray and fraying UNC track shorts and one of a dozen white wifebeaters she has stashed around her drawers — and all the air in the kitchen feels good on her skin, cool and liquid, almost as good as the feel of Cas, warm and close to her back when she goes to the fridge.

"Have you ever made pie?" she asks, pulling out butter and ice cubes.

Cas blinks.  "I have never even eaten pie," he confesses.

"What, there's no pie in heaven?" she says, making a face.  "What kind of heaven is that?"

"Heaven is different things to different people," Cas explains, and holds out his hands when she motions for him to do it, opening his arms for canisters of flour and salt and sugar, big mixing bowls from the cupboards.

She angles him a skeptical look, hitching one knee onto the counter to reach for the food processor on the upper shelf of the cabinet — just half an inch out of reach.  "What the hell does that mean?"

"It means," he tells her patiently, settling the flour and bowls onto the kitchen table and reaching over her, easy, to snag the appliance, "that each person's version of heaven is very different.  Some people see heaven as a garden, like Eden, others may see an ocean."  He hands her the food processor with a smile.  "Maybe your heaven is pie."

She swallows hard, puts that thought away.  She's going to enjoy today of it kills her.

"That would be stupid, wouldn't it," she mutters, holds the food processor close to her chest.

Cas tilts his head at her.  "If it makes you happy, then no, it is not."

Deanna clears her throat.  "Do you know how to use a knife?" she asks, and she knows it's a desperate change of subject, but nobody's ever accused her of being graceful.

Cas says, "I do," and they're off.  

She shows him what to do with the nearly-frozen sticks of butter, and Cas applies himself to slicing them into perfect half-inch cubes like she'd showed him the directions chipped into stone tablets.  She measures out flour and salt and sugar and water and the butter in the food processor, and Cas watches with wide eyes as she pulses it all six and a half times, just the way she's always done it, before turning it all out over the cool surface of the kitchen counter she's dusted down with flour.

He watches her hands, when she's molding the mix into two discs, and she points out the little flecks of still-whole butter while she covers them in Saran Wrap, tells him how she'll leave them in the fridge for an hour, and it'll be the perfect time to make a filling.

"Where did you learn to make pies?" he asks, and he's still standing too close to her, perched near her hip and sitting now, on the one clean section of counter while Deanna plucks a pint of strawberries and a half-dozen peaches and lemons out of a basket on the window sill.

Deanna laughs.  "If anybody else asks, tell them Mom did."  

She grabs a pairing knife and starts slicing the peaces, into rich, yellow half moons, red on the inside curve as she pries them away from the pit.  She hands one to Cas, who inspects it and inspects it before he puts it into his mouth, hesitating.  

"But just between you and me?" she says, winking.  "Bobby showed me."

Cas frowns, brow wrinkling.  "Bobby," he repeats.

"Another hunter," Deanna explains.  "His wife apparently used to make pies all the time."

"You've all lost someone," Cas observes, and he takes another piece of peach.  Normally, that'd be worth a slap to the hand, but Cas is new, and doesn't know the rules, so she lets him slide.  She hopes he learns better kitchen manners later, that someone will explain them to him after she's gone.  "Is that how you all become hunters?"

Her knife slips, and there's a sudden shock before she sees red blooming across her thumb, and she's already grabbing a kitchen towel by the time the sharp ache registers.

"Maybe," she murmurs.  It sounds better than, _Dad never really gave us a choice on that one_.  She's glad for what she knows, that they can save people, and whatever distant promise of an unremarkable life — that Sam had wanted so badly when he was little, that he still does — Deanna has a list in her head of all the people she's helped, that most times, that outweighs any regret.  Today, she's not sure.

Cas takes her hand, takes the towel away, and Deanna lets him, watches the blood pearl around the cut for a beat before Cas runs the pad of his own thumb up her palm, along the stem of her finger, over the cut, and before she can say, "Hey, watch it," the blood smears and the pain is a vanishing ache.

She looks wonderingly at her thumb, healed.  "I didn't know you could do that."

"Well," Cas hedges.  "I'm not supposed to."

"No pie, no fixing people," Deanna sighs.  "What _can_ you do, Castiel, angel of the Lord?"

"I follow orders," Cas answers.  "I keep watch.  I stay vigilant."

Deanna raises an eyebrow.  

"I can see that you are grieving today," he concludes, thoughtful.  

She clears her throat.  "And now," she says, turning to her peaches, to the lemon slices and her microplane, the ordinary, uncomplicated things she can get her hands around, the easy things she knows, that she has always loved, "we make the pie filling."

Deanna is introducing Castiel, angel of the Lord, to the wonders of coffee and scrambled eggs and bacon by the time Sam staggers down the stairs, the rain outside still going strong.  Her brother falls down the last three steps in shock and by the time he manages to scramble to his feet, Deanna's already started pouring him a cup of coffee, saying, "Morning, Sam — Sam, Castiel.  Castiel, Sam.  Sam, Castiel is spending the day with us."

Sam blinks twice.  "O—kay," he says, sitting down carefully across from Cas at the kitchen table with wondering, curious eyes.  "Um.  Is everything okay?"

Cas nods.  "I told you sister I had never eaten pie."

"You've _never eaten pie?_ " Sam asks, and grabs at the coffee Deanna puts down in front of him before sliding back into her own seat, crying:

"That's what _I_  said."

Cas gives them both a look, at what must be matching baffled expressions.  "I still have not tasted pie," he points out, and Sam gives Deanna an aggrieved look, like she's personally denying Cas pie.  

She points at the oven.  "Dude, I am _working on it._ "

Sam stews in his bitchiest of bitchy expressions for a long minute before he asks, arrested, "Wait, does Dad knows Cas is spending the day with us?"

From the stairs, Deanna hears, "What the _hell is he doing at my table?_ "

"Yeah," she says, and reaches for her coffee again.  "Yeah, I think he knows now."

***

Dad, aside from being furious about "that angel" being at his kitchen table, can't really do all that much about it.  It's the downside of having two adult children who both like your angel, and appreciate his breaking you out of jail, and advising you to shut the fuck up, sit down, drink your coffee, and wait for the pie to be ready.

"Deanna," Dad tries.  

"No," she tells him, and tops off Cas's coffee.  He has discovered he likes it with sugar, no milk, and Deanna gives him the sugar bowl and slides the half and half at Sam, easy division of resources, and sits down to drink her own black.

Dad starts, "But — "

"He dragged you out of hell, Dad," Sam cuts in reasonably.  "He's an _angel_."

Cas just observes the conversation ping-pong between everybody, watchful, and Deanna presses her knee against his under the table because she can.

"Anybody who busts anybody in this  family out of hell can have coffee," she says.

"And eat Deanna's pie," Sam says loyally, and flashes Cas a grin.  

Deanna doesn't feel like breaking his heart and telling him Cas probably isn't going to show Sam his wings, so instead, she says, "Right, he can have as much of my pie as he wants," before she really thinks about what she's said.  "Um."

Sam's face gets that manically gleeful look on it, and before he can make the inevitable and shitty joke, Cas interrupts to say, "To clarify, I still haven't tasted this pie."

"Okay, that made it worse," Deanna decides, and pushes away from the table, where Sam's herniating something in his effort to resist laughing out loud, and Dad's glowering so hard he's going to glare a hole into Cas's face.

"Hey, Castiel," Sam says, "you know who _has_ tasted Deanna's pie?"

"Sam!" she and Dad shout at once, and the day deteriorates from there.

***

Sam manages to hold it in until almost lunchtime before he asks Cas if he can see his wings, and Cas, heartless, says, "No," flatly, and goes to investigate the bank of hideous pre- and post-adolescent photographs of Deanna and Sam that line the mantle.  It rains, all day long, no thunder or lighting, just a heavy, even downpour, and the sky is a uniform gray-blue overhead.  It chills the summer air to a minor key, and Deanna, after breakfast, and after doling out slices of pie to Sam and Dad and Cas and herself, takes hers and goes to sit on the old wicker chair on the back porch.  Outside, it smells green, it smells alive, it smells like a lake, earthy and alive and like damped-down wood chips and just-waking gardens.  Deanna thinks about the massive sycamore that shades the porch, and wonders what kind of tree Castiel looks like when he is in heaven, if the ground underneath is wet with moss or soft and green, and since Cas says that heaven is different things to different people, Deanna decides it is grass.

It's weird, she thought she would have things to say to Sam, and to Dad, that she'd want to wrap herself up in them both but she doesn't.  She thought maybe swimming at the rock quarry, ice cream on the porch at Maple View Farm, dinner at Crook's Corner, a 3 a.m. burrito at Cosmic.  It turns out, mostly, she wants to sit here and breathe, curl her feet up under herself and nurse her coffee, savor it.

"What are you thinking?" Cas asks, there suddenly where he wasn't, standing next to her on the porch and gazing outward at the trees, at the water washing downward.

Deanna smiles against the lip of the cup.  "How much I like today," she says.

Cas makes a vague noise.  "The rain?"

_And the company_ , Deanna thinks.  "All of it," Deanna murmurs.  She tips her head to look up at him, fond in a way she shouldn't be.  She barely knows him, never really will, but Cas is easy for her where he shouldn't be, too.  "Thank you.  For staying today."

"Thank you for the pie," Cas answers.

Deanna laughs.  "You didn't like it."

"It was strange," Cas admits.  But then his mouth tugs up again, that thing she thinks is a smile, and maybe is just for her.  "But it was good.  It was new.  It was sweet."

"It's a good start," she decides.  

She's planted a seed, she's sure.  In the future, probably, Cas will be curious about pie forever, and maybe he'll taste pumpkin pie and strawberry pie and she's only sorry she won't be here for it — or for the day that Sam wears him down and Cas gives in and shows Sam his wings.  Cas looks restless, even though he's perfectly still, and Deanna sees that he's put on his shoes again, his jacket and his trench, and she thinks he probably has other things to do, other charges to follow, other souls to creep on.

"Hey, if you have to run," she says, waves a hand out, toward the trees.  "You should go."

He looks at her from the corner of his eyes.  "I must," he says reluctantly.  "I am being recalled to my garrison."

She nods, because Zachariah had said he would, that Castiel, although he had a good heart and was a good soldier, could never understand the complexities of gray areas, that he'd fight her decision if he knew about it.  "I'll call him back," Zachariah had said, writing Enochian in blue ink across parchment that looked as old as time, reassuring her as they'd struck their deal.  "You don't want that level of complication, anyway."

"Go," she says.

"You're not telling me something," Cas accuses.

"You can yell at me about it later," Deanna offers, because she's a little shit down to the bones of her, she can't help it.  

He nods at her, and takes a step forward like he's about to launch away.  "I will," he promises, and vanishes between one blink and the next.

Dad spends the rest of the day stomping around the house like a bear with a sore head and an itchy trigger finger.  Deanna alternately ignores him or coddles him or feeds him, and for dinner she makes Sam make chicken parmesan again, because it's her favorite, and she should have her favorite for dinner.  Afterward, they show Dad the newest Die Hard movie — he pronounces it "okay" — and he claps Sam on the shoulder, kisses Deanna on the temple, and goes to bed without stopping by the liquor cabinet at all.  She's happier about it than she should be.

"Hey, Sam?" she says, later that night, knocking as she peeks into his room.  It's half packed up, half put away, stacks of textbooks piled sky high, and Sam folded up in the middle of all of it in a law school t-shirt with a highlighter stuck in his mouth.  She feels a moment of longing for him so aching and sharp she fists her hand, holds it over her heart.  "Can I come in?"

He nods, and clears a spot on the bed for her.  "What's up?"

_I'm going to miss you.  You're amazing.  I'm so proud you're my baby brother._   

She shrugs.  "It's just been a while since we talked," she mumbles, pulls her knees up to her chest and rests her chin on them.  "Not since right after Dad got back, really."

"Well, you have new friends now," Sam says, too earnest.  "You know.  _Angels_."

Deanna throws a study guide at him.  "Bitch."

Sam throws it back.  "Jerk," he quips.

Sam is a giant and a genius.  He takes a fuckton of women's study courses, and every year, he goes to Take Back the Night and stands out like a massive, awkward beanstalk in an ocean of girls with Buddy Holly glasses.  He vets all her boyfriends.  He sort of telekinetic and scared of it, but he fights it, works on it, he tries to control it.  He always wants to listen, to know how you feel about something.  He always wants to help.  He fights with Dad because he thinks Deanna deserves better, that he deserves better.  He wants, and he wants to give, he wants to help.  He makes her laugh.

Deanna can't think of anybody better or more wonderful in the world.  She thinks she's so lucky to have known him, to have spent time with him, and reaches out, ignores the fact that she hasn't done this in half a decade, now, and runs her fingers through his bangs, pushing them out of his face until he slaps her hands away, embarrassed.

"Dee, Jesus, come on," he complains.

She grins.  "You're pretty solid, you know that, Sam?" 

"Is that a fat joke?" he asks suspiciously.

"Good night, Sam," Deanna laughs, leans over to kiss the crown of his head.  

She knows that to Sam, she blurs the line between mother and sister and friend, but she's always lived in that gray space, it's who she is.  It would be a lie if she tells herself he's only ever been her little brother, that she didn't walk him to school and fret like any of the moms, waiting in a line for him to come out at the end of the school day.  Sam has always been hers, more than anybody else's.

He shoves her away, easy.  "Go away," he mutters.  "Go to sleep."

"Okay," Deanna agrees, and she pauses just a minute in the doorway.  "Hey, Sam?"

Her brother looks up at her, hair right back in his eyes, and he asks, "Yeah?"

"Don't stay up too late."  She smiles at him.  "Okay?"

Sam waves her off.  "Night, Deanna."

"Night," she murmurs, and goes, down the hall, past the door to her room and to peer into Dad's bedroom.  

It's late — past midnight — and Dad's asleep, or looks like it, curled up on his side in his bed, halfway under the sheets.  There's something sad and small about looking at her father like this; he's always been larger than life in her head, the shadow that stretched over everything she did, everything she said.  He'd always been the voice in the back of her mind telling her she was being an idiot, that she didn't need this, that she was better than that, that she better look after her brother, that that boy wasn't worth her time, that she was good, that she took such good care of them.  

She thinks about being seven and Dad saying if she were a boy, that they'd hunt more, that he could trust her to take care of herself; she remembers Pastor Jim saying maybe it was a God damn blessing then, that Deanna wasn't.  She remembers being eleven and lonely, dumped at the Roadhouse with Ellen for the weekend, Sammy running around with Jo on the floor of the restaurant like an idiot, and Deanna at the bar doing long division.  She remembers the long, awful months when she wouldn't let Dad touch her, and how he had to know — _had to_ — that something was wrong, and how they'd both been too cowardly to say anything.  She remembers eighteen, and twenty-one, and twenty-six all blurring together.  She remembers being twenty-seven and burying her Daddy, being thirty and finding him all over again.

It's been a short life, but they're worth it.  Sam and Dad are worth it, Deanna thinks.

"Deanna," Zachariah murmurs, his voice wet against the back of her neck, "it's time."

She shudders, clutches at the doorframe.  She thinks about running.  She thinks about changing her mind.  She thinks about Sam.  She thinks about Dad.  She thinks, _Cas, sorry,_ and she says, "Okay, fine," and Deanna feels Zachariah smiling against her shoulder, pressing a proprietary kiss there.

"Perfect," he murmurs, warm on her skin.


End file.
